Pinkola Estés, Clarissa "Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype"

Pinkola Estés, Clarissa "Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype" - 1992

The latest book that was suggested by Emma Watson from the Goodreads group "Our Shared Shelf". There have been good and bad books, in my opinion, in this group. This is one of the better ones. Dr. Pinkola Estés talks about myths about the Wild Woman, she tells us fairy tales, folk sagas, anything that has to do with women standing on their own feet, defending themselves and their offspring and explains the symbolism behind it. Highly interesting.

The author explains so much about the human being so that this book should not just be read by women, also a great selection for men who would like to understand women better. You can tell this is written by a professional who knows everything about the human psyche, has studied it for a long time and always tries to look at every aspect of every story. Dr. Pinkola Estés is a Jungian analyst and even if you have never heard of Jung, she explains everything very detailed so that anyone can follow her stories and her analysis.

I have read a lot of fairy tales and there were quite a few stories that I heard in a similar version but every story the author retold was like new to me the way she explained them.

I borrowed this book from the library but might want to buy it for myself to read it again some other time. That's how good it was. And encouraging book that teaches us a lot about ourselves.

From the back cover:
"Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Though the gifts of wildish nature come to us at birth, society's attempt to 'civilize' us into rigid roles has plundered this treasure, and muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. Without Wild Woman, we become over-domesticated, fearful, uncreative, trapped. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora storyteller, shows how woman's vitality can be restored through what she calls 'psychic archeological digs' into the bins of the female unconscious. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes uses multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories chosen from over twenty years of research that help women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype. Dr. Estes collects the bones of many stories, looking for the archetypal motifs that set a woman's inner life into motion. 'La Loba' teaches about the transformative function of the psyche. In 'Bluebeard,' we learn what to do with wounds that will not heal; in 'Skeleton Woman,' we glimpse the mystical power of relationship and how dead feelings can be revived; 'Vasalisa the Wise' brings our lost womanly instincts to the surface again; 'The Handless Maiden' recovers the Wild Woman initiation rites; and 'The Little Match Girl' warns against the insidious dangers of a life spent in fantasy. In these and other stories, we focus on the many qualities of Wild Woman. We retrieve, examine, love, and understand her, and hold her against our deep psyches as one whois both magic and medicine. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and lifegiving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.."