Wolf Ethology

Wolves are good at relationships. Anyone who has observed wolves sees how deeply they bond. Mates are most often for life. Even though they clash, even though there is dissension, their bonds carry them over and through harsh winters, plentiful springs, long walks, new offspring, old predators, tribal dances, and group sings.

Estés invokes field-observable wolf pair-bonding and pack cohesion as the ethological model for the Life/Death/Life nature of authentic human love relationships.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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A wolf shadows anyone or anything that passes through her territory. It is her way of gathering information. It is the equivalent of manifesting and then becoming like smoke, and then manifesting again. Wolves can move ever so softly.

Estés reads the wolf’s territorial shadowing behaviour as a precise ethological model for the psychological art of attentive, non-intrusive observation she prescribes for the individuation process.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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Many women are sensitive the way sand is sensitive to the wave, the way trees are sensitive to the quality of the air, the way a wolf can hear another creature step into her territory from over a mile away.

Estés draws on wolf sensory acuity as ethological evidence for the instinctual perceptual range she identifies as the innate endowment of psychologically intact women.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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Watch even a small dog rip into its meat; hear a big dog gulp its food, slurp its bowl of water. They wolf down their food. If the matted hair of the mythical wolf still lies under the dog’s silky sheen, then terrible traits still lurk, archetypally, in dog’s ancestry.

Hillman traces observable canine feeding behaviour back to the ancestral wolf, arguing that mythological wolf traits — voraciousness, ferocity — persist archetypally beneath domestication.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008thesis

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In man, the wolf represents that strange indiscriminate desire to eat up everybody and everything, to have everything, which is visible in many neuroses where the main problem is that the person remains infantile because of an unhappy childhood. Such persons develop a hungry wolf within themselves.

Von Franz grounds the wolf symbol in an ethological characteristic — insatiable voracity — and maps it directly onto the psychology of the orally fixated, emotionally deprived complex.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis

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It is a kind of driven passion of eating and eating, and it generally results from an early childhood experience where the child was starved and deprived of love or of some other vital need on the psychological and physical level. The wolf, therefore, belongs also to Wotan in Germanic mythology.

Von Franz links wolf appetite-behaviour to both its mythological association with Wotan and to the clinical phenomenon of insatiable need produced by early deprivation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting

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It is a kind of driven passion of eating and eating, and it generally results from an early childhood experience where the child was starved and deprived of love or of some other vital need on the psychological and physical level. The wolf, therefore, belongs also to Wotan in Germanic mythology.

Parallel citation confirming von Franz’s formulation of wolf voracity as the behavioural signature of both a mythological complex and a clinical syndrome of early emotional deprivation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting

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Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands.

Estés establishes the foundational homology of the book: the ecological fate of actual wolves and wild animals is structurally parallel to the psychological fate of women’s instinctual nature.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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It is told that there is a place in the desert where the spirit of women and the spirit of wolves meet across time. I felt I was onto something when in the Texas borderlands I heard a story called ‘Loba Girl’ about a woman who was a wolf who was a woman.

Estés anchors her methodology in the convergence of ethnographic fieldwork and mythological tradition to establish the wolf as the primary ethological correlate of the Wild Woman archetype.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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He came to a wolf who lay in the middle of the road and begged to be allowed to eat the horse, for he was dreadfully hungry, not having eaten anything for two years. The prince answered that he was very sorry, but… the wolf insisted and promised to help him later.

Von Franz presents the fairy-tale wolf’s extreme hunger and subsequent transformation into a helpful carrier as ethological behaviour recast in narrative form to illuminate shadow integration.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

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‘I’m a wolf from another time and place,’ said he. And plucking a lash from his eye, gave it to her and said, ‘Use this, and—‘

Estés employs the wounded wolf freed from a trap as an ethological-mythological figure whose gift of perception — the wolf’s eyelash — symbolises the visionary capacity recovered through instinctual reconnection.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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The first analytical psychologist who specifically mentions modern ethology seems to have been Fordham. Fordham considered that Tinbergen’s demonstration of innate release mechanisms (IRMs) in animals may be applicable to humans, especially in infancy.

Samuels documents the entry of scientific ethology — specifically Tinbergen’s IRMs — into analytical psychology through Fordham, providing the theoretical bridge between animal behaviour research and archetype theory.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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The lives of all animals, even in the very early level of evolution, are shaped by what the behaviorists would call patterns, a certain mode of fighting, of courting, of looking after the young, of mating, and so on, which differs for each animal species.

Von Franz invokes species-specific behavioural patterns — the foundational concept of ethology — as the biological substrate for her analysis of instinctual conflict and shadow formation in human psychology.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

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The mother is perceived to belong to the tribes of lions, the wolves, and male elephants; the father, to the more devious, cunning, and less confrontational world of tigers, foxes, panthers, and tuskless elephants.

Hillman notes that children’s dream and drawing perception assigns wolves to the maternal-confrontational pole, indicating the wolf’s ethological character as a primary carrier of archaic maternal power.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

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As to the wolf, we must probably put him in the father’s place, for the child unconsciously attributed to the father any act of violence towards the mother. This motif, too, is based on countless myths dealing with the violation of the mother.

Jung assigns the wolf a paternal-aggressive valence in child psychology, grounding the symbolic interpretation in the behavioural characteristic of predatory violence transposed onto family-complex dynamics.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961supporting

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The wolf with antimony, which was called the ‘wolf of metals,’ because it ‘devoured,’ or united with, all the known metals except gold. On account of its use in purifying molten gold—the impurities being removed in the form of a scum—antimony was also called balneum regis.

Edinger records the alchemical designation of antimony as ‘wolf of metals,’ demonstrating how wolf voraciousness as an ethological trait was absorbed into alchemical symbolism for the devouring-purifying operation.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985aside

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The wolf is also her creature, and the myth of the lycanthrope or werewolf, which was originally Greek before it worked its way into eastern European folklore, also belongs to her. The werewolf appears when the Moon is full, and it is said to destroy only those it loves.

Greene situates wolf behaviour within the mythological framework of Artemis and lycanthropy, reading the werewolf as the eruption of instinctual wolf nature under possession by lunar consciousness.

Greene, Liz; Sasportas, Howard, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992aside

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