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Women Who Run With the Wolves
Women Who Run With the Wolves
The book in which Estés introduces the wild-woman archetype to the post-Jungian vocabulary and demonstrates the method of fairy-tale amplification as applied to the archetypal feminine. The work is structured around a sequence of tales — “La Loba,” “Bluebeard,” “Vasalisa the Wise,” “Skeleton Woman,” “Sealskin, Soulskin,” “The Handless Maiden,” among others — each read as “psychic-archaeological” excavation of “the ruins of the female underworld” (Estés 2017).
Its governing claim is that “healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion” (Estés 2017), and that both species have been hunted in parallel by a culture that cannot abide the instinctual. The book’s project is to return the reader to the “river beneath the river,” the rio-abajo-rio, by way of the old stories.
The work is the first of a projected five-part, twenty-two-hundred-page series written by hand beginning in 1971. It received the Gradiva Award and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three years. Its reception was cultural as much as clinical — it reached readers who had no prior acquaintance with depth psychology and introduced them to Jungian ideas through the medium of the tale told aloud.