Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Wildish Nature’ functions as a master term articulating the instinctual-psychic substrate that Clarissa Pinkola Estés identifies as the constitutive ground of feminine selfhood. The concept is not synonymous with mere primitivity or regression; rather, it designates a coherent, generative inner ecology — one that is simultaneously biological, archetypal, and spiritual — whose suppression by cultural forces produces what Estés diagnoses as the ‘semi-destroyed state’ of modern women. The term operates on multiple registers: as a lost birthright to be reclaimed (the pursuit motif), as a cyclical state of being requiring periodic return (the sealskin motif), as a capacity for full-spectrum sensory and intuitive engagement, and as a psychic structure whose vitality is homologous with the health of the outer natural world. Robert Bly’s parallel construction of the Wild Man in the masculine tradition provides a comparative counterpoint, though his formulation remains less elaborated and less systematically linked to instinct theory. Key tensions within the corpus include the dialectic between domestication and wildness, the vulnerability of the feral woman newly returned to her instincts, the threat posed by psychic predators to this nature, and the political necessity of preserving it against cultural erasure. The term anchors Estés’s entire mythopoetic therapeutic program.
Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.
This passage establishes the foundational equivalence between ecological and psychic wildness, framing the suppression of Wildish Nature as a civilizational catastrophe parallel to environmental destruction.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
This is what the wildish nature offers us: the ability to see what is before us through focusing, through stopping and looking and smelling and listening and feeling and tasting.
This passage defines Wildish Nature’s positive function as the restoration of full-spectrum perception, intuition, and creative self-possession — the capacity for integrated, embodied knowing.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Wild Woman is the health of all women. Without her, women’s psychology makes no sense… no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change.
This passage argues that Wildish Nature, personified as Wild Woman, is the transhistorical and transcultural psychic constant upon which all feminine psychological health depends.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
It is for this reason that the wildish nature in women must be preserved — and even, in some instances, guarded with extreme vigilance — so that it is not suddenly abducted and garroted.
This passage frames Wildish Nature as a political and psychic resource requiring active defence against predatory cultural forces that would extinguish it.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
It is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature.
This passage describes the phenomenology of estrangement from Wildish Nature — the affective pressure of longing and bereftness that compels its pursuit and recovery.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
The return to the wildish state periodically is what replenishes her psychic reserves for her projects, family, relationships, and creative life in the topside world.
This passage theorizes Wildish Nature not as a permanent condition but as a cyclical psychic home whose periodic re-entry sustains a woman’s functioning across all domains of life.
, 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.
This passage introduces the figure of the feral woman to articulate the specific dangers facing a woman who has been severed from and then attempts to return to her Wildish Nature without adequate preparation.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
It is our brush with the wild nature that drives us not to limit our conversations to humans, not to limit our most splendid movements to dance floors, nor our ears only to music made by human-made instruments.
This passage illustrates Wildish Nature’s expansive, boundary-dissolving function: contact with it prevents the reduction of perception, expression, and beauty to culturally sanctioned limits.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art… The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
This passage argues for the universal applicability of Wildish Nature, asserting that far from being confined to retreat or solitude, it is the animating force behind all human creative and civic endeavor.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
There is an entrapment of the wild nature which ought to be free to do, be, look into whatever it likes.
This passage demonstrates how psychic secrets born of shame constitute a specific mechanism of entrapment for Wildish Nature, restricting the freedom of instinctual curiosity and choice.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
To build an enduring fire beneath the creative life, and cook up ideas on a systematic basis… to feed the relationship between oneself and the wildish nature.
This passage presents Vasalisa’s tasks as practical psychic disciplines by which a woman maintains and nourishes her ongoing relationship with Wildish Nature through creative and ritual regularity.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
We may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly 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.
This passage locates the reclamation of Wildish Nature as an interior transformation invisible to the outer world but constitutive of a woman’s deepest selfhood.
, 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.
This passage integrates the reclamation of Wildish Nature within the Jungian individuation process, emphasizing that its recovery begins as an involuntary, unscheduled, and always-premature psychic event.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as cantadora, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, especially the very accessible and the very simple ones.
This passage grounds the therapeutic recovery of Wildish Nature in actual encounter with the natural world, arguing that simple natural phenomena carry restorative power for the instinctual psyche.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The Wild Woman looks out on the forest and sees a home for herself and all humans. Yet others may look at the same forest and imagine it barren of trees and their pockets bursting with money.
This passage places Wildish Nature in direct ecological-political opposition to exploitative consciousness, linking the psychic damage of its suppression to the literal destruction of the natural world.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The initial purpose of developing such an important construct within a woman’s psyche… is to create a temporary arrangement that will ultimately produce a spirit child who can cohabit and translate in and between both the mundane and the wildish worlds.
This passage theorizes the psychic mediation between ego and Wildish Nature as generative, producing a ‘spirit child’ capable of inhabiting both civilized and wild registers simultaneously.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
When the Wild Man has been preserved inside, a man also feels a genuine friendliness toward the wildness in nature.
Bly offers a masculine parallel to Estés’s thesis, arguing that preservation of the inner Wild Man produces an authentic relational openness to outer natural wildness, though his formulation lacks the systematic depth of her analysis.
, 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.
This passage presents the two-million-year-old woman as the archetypal embodiment of Wildish Nature: simultaneously geological, temporal, and psychic, grounding the concept in deep evolutionary time.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The garden is a concrete connection to life and death… Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche.
This passage proposes the garden as a practical mediating practice through which women sustain their relationship to Wildish Nature’s Life/Death/Life rhythms.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The force called Death is one of the two magnetic forks of the wild nature. If one learns to name the dualities, one will eventually bump right up against the bald skull of the Death nature.
This passage situates the Life/Death/Life duality as intrinsic to Wildish Nature, arguing that full encounter with the wild self necessarily includes confrontation with the death principle.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
We are asking from the instinctive self, not in stilted logic, not ego-wise, but Wild Woman–wise, what work, adjustments, loosenings, or emphasizing needs to take place.
This passage contrasts ego-driven logic with Wildish Nature’s intuitive assessments, illustrating how the instinctive self offers a distinct epistemological mode for navigating psychic life.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside