Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Wild’ functions less as a descriptive adjective than as an ontological category — a register of psychic life that precedes, exceeds, and frequently resists civilisation’s domesticating imperatives. Clarissa Pinkola Estés constructs the Wild as the ground-state of the feminine instinctual nature, personified in the archetype of the Wild Woman: a primordial, generative force whose diminishment tracks exactly the destruction of outer wilderness. For Estés, wildness is not chaos but a deeper ecological order, one that sustains creativity, cyclicity, and soul. Robert Bly, approaching the term from a masculine initiatory angle, posits the Wild Man as an autonomous mythological being — hairy, grief-conscious, nature-aligned — whose re-encounter by the modern male is the precondition for genuine initiation. Where Estés emphasises reclamation of an interior feminine nature suppressed by patriarchal culture, Bly stresses the structural necessity of the Wild Man as mentor-figure, distinct from and irreducible to the personal unconscious. Both authors share the conviction that taming represents psychic impoverishment, and both locate the wild in relation to wound, instinct, and a belonging to nature that modernity has severed. The Benveniste passage introduces a philological tension — the domestic/wild distinction may itself be a retrospective scholarly imposition — adding etymological depth to the corpus’s thematic arguments.
Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.
Estés establishes the foundational homology of the work: the destruction of outer wilderness and the suppression of inner wild feminine nature are not analogous but structurally identical processes.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
I postulate the feral woman as one who was once in a natural psychic state — that is, in her rightful wild mind — then later captured by whatever turn of events, thereby becoming overly domesticated and deadened in proper instincts.
Estés introduces ‘feral’ as a clinical subcategory of the wild, denoting a woman whose instinctual nature has been domesticated and whose attempted return to wildness renders her paradoxically vulnerable.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The Wild Man, then, through his disciplines, prepares an emotional body that can receive grief, ecstasy, and spirit. He prepares matter.
Bly argues that the Wild Man’s function is not mere liberation from constraint but an ascetic preparation of the emotional and somatic self for the full range of psychic experience.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
The story says that when the King locked up the Wild Man, ‘he gave the key into the keeping of the Queen,’ but we were only about seven then, and in any case our father never told us what he had done with it.
Bly interprets the imprisoned Wild Man as the psychic energy caged by civilisation and maternal authority, and the recovery of the key as the central initiatory task of masculine individuation.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for with her their creative lives blossom.
Estés presents the recovery of the wild nature as the central telos of women’s psychological life, from which creativity, relational depth, sexuality, and protection from predation all flow.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
One trace of the Wild Man is the spontaneity we have preserved from childhood. No matter how many family reunions we have participated in, or how many committee meetings we have attended, funny little motions of the shoulders and weird cries are waiting inside us.
Bly locates surviving traces of the Wild Man within the body itself — in involuntary spontaneity and the unpredictable — as evidence that wildness is not fully extinguished by socialisation.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
Estés makes her most totalising claim: wild feminine energy is not a retreat from civilised life but its generative substrate, the animating force behind creative, political, and spiritual work.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
We have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.
Estés describes the outcome of underworld initiation as the interior restoration of wildness — a state invisible to social scrutiny but constitutive of genuine selfhood.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
For women this searching and finding is based on the mysterious passion that women have for what is wild, what is innately themselves. We have been calling the object of this yearning Wild Woman.
Estés identifies the Wild Woman not merely as archetype but as the object of a constitutive feminine longing — the eros of individuation itself directed toward one’s own instinctual nature.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
A King without enough Wild Man will be a king for human beings, but animals, ocean, and trees will have no representation in his Senate.
Bly extends the Wild Man’s significance from personal psychology to political ecology, arguing that its absence in leadership produces a culture that cannot attend to the non-human world.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
These attributes are the main fundaments of the archetypal psyche of Wild Woman; a joyous and wild life force, where houses dance, where inanimates such as mortars fly like birds, where the old woman can make magic.
Estés characterises the Wild Woman archetype as fundamentally animistic — a psychic force in which the boundary between animate and inanimate dissolves and life becomes exuberantly excessive.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The real miracle of individuation and reclamation of Wild Woman is that we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough.
Estés positions the reclamation of wild nature as an initiatory process that necessarily precedes the ego’s readiness — wildness imposes itself as vocation rather than choice.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
We need to understand the Wild Man is not ‘inside’ us. The story suggests that the Wild Man is actually a being who can exist and thrive for centuries outside the human psyche.
Bly makes a crucial ontological claim distinguishing his Wild Man from a merely intrapsychic construct — the Wild Man is an autonomous, transpersonal, mythological reality, more analogous to a mentor than a complex.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
She is the original Wild Woman who lives beneath and yet on the topside of the earth. She lives in and through us and we are surrounded by her.
Estés grounds the Wild Woman archetype in geological deep time, identifying her with the two-million-year-old stratum of psychic life that underlies and pervades human consciousness.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Shiva is a blossoming or development of the Wild Man, immensely articulated. Shiva keeps the wild aspect — his followers go naked and do not cut their hair — but also has an ascetic aspect, a husbandly side, and the enraged or Bhairava side.
Bly situates the Wild Man within the cross-cultural lineage of the Lord of Animals, using Shiva as evidence that wildness and spiritual discipline have historically been integrated rather than opposed.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
When I was a child in the 1950s, in the early days of industrial disgraces against the earth, an oil barge sank in the Chicago Basin of Lake Michigan.
Estés grounds the psychic argument in environmental history, using industrial pollution as a concrete correlate of the inner damage done when the wild — in nature and in psyche — is treated as expendable.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The burning of the Wild Man preceded the burning of the witches by several centuries, and it proceeded from the same fear and anger.
Bly historicises the suppression of the Wild Man as a systematic cultural violence continuous with the persecution of women, rooting both in ecclesiastical anxiety about instinctual and natural life.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
Even though we have only heard about, glimpsed, or dreamt a wondrous wild world that we belonged to once, even though we have not yet or only momentarily touched it, the memory of it is a beacon that guides us.
Estés argues that a residual memory of wild belonging functions as a psychological compass even for those most thoroughly alienated from their instinctual nature.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The garden is a concrete connection to life and death. You could even say there is a religion of garden, for it teaches profound psychological and spiritual lessons.
Estés proposes the garden as a ritual practice for tending the wild psyche — a site where the Life/Death/Life nature is experienced concretely through cultivation, loss, and regeneration.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The boy in our story, or the thirty-five-year-old man in our mind — however you want to look at it — now does something marvelous. He speaks to the Wild Man once more.
Bly identifies the initiatory turning point as the moment a man establishes direct address with the Wild Man — an act of relational courage that precedes departure from the maternal-paternal enclosure.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
It is a sure sign of wild zygotes in the family if the parents are offended all the time and the children feel as though they can never do anything right.
Estés introduces ‘wild zygotes’ as a colloquial marker for individuals who carry an instinctual nature that destabilises the domesticated family system, framing this as diagnostic rather than pathological.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
Joyous Body: The Wild Flesh. Watching wolves play, one sees they hit against each other in a kind of rolling dance. It is that connection through the skin that communicates something like, ‘You belong, we belong.’
Estés extends the wild into somatic register — the body’s tactile sociality among wolves serves as a model for a non-alienated embodied belonging that human cultures may recover.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
Scholars came to believe that the difference between sūs and porcus reflected a distinction between the wild and the domesticated pig. Let us scrutinize those Latin authors who wrote on agricultural themes.
Benveniste demonstrates philologically that the wild/domestic opposition, taken as self-evident, may be a retrospective scholarly imposition — a finding that implicitly interrogates the conceptual stability of ‘wild’ as a category.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside