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Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Jungian analyst, poet, and cantadora — keeper of the old stories in the mesemondók tradition. Born to a Mexican-Spanish bloodline and raised by a Hungarian refugee family near the Michigan woodlands, Estés carries a doubled ethnic inheritance into her analytic practice. She was trained in the Zurich tradition of analytical and archetypal psychology — “amplification of leitmotifs, archetypal symbology, world mythology, ancient and popular iconology, ethnology, world religions, and interpretation” (Estés 2017) — and braided that training with the oral-traditional storytelling of her elders. She is, in her own phrasing, “a Jungian psychoanalyst, poet, and cantadora, keeper of the old stories.”
Her contribution to the Lineage is the recovery and naming of the wild-woman archetype — the instinctual feminine ground of the psyche — and the re-grounding of fairy-tale-amplification in oral tradition. Where marie-louise-von-franz read the Märchen as the anonymous dream of the folk, Estés returns the tale to the campfire and demonstrates what the tale, told aloud, does to the psyche that the interpreted text cannot.
Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992) was the first volume of a planned five-part, twenty-two-hundred-page series on “the inner life,” written by hand beginning in 1971 after a pilgrimage in which she received her elders’ blessings to compose “a special body of work rooted in the song-language of our spiritual roots” (Estés 2017). The book won the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and remained on bestseller lists for nearly three years after its release.