Mirror Sites:
CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: May 2, 2001
Latest update: May 2, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

jeanne's wolf
Story of the week: Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

I was in my office Tuesday afternoon. For a few moments no one was there, and I started to draw with the Paint program. Suddenly, my wolf appeared. I liked him. And so, here he is. Now, we have to consider where he comes from and what he means. He is the joy of wild, unrestrained pleasure in the freedom to be me. We all need moments like that. But he is dangerous, if I let him run unrestrained. This is the battle between the "self" and the "other."

There was something about Women Who Run with Wolves that I didn't like, and for the longest time I couldn't put my finger on it. There is the wolf in me. I like letting him out now and then. But there was something that made me uncomfortable. I think now that it is the wolf's intense independence. It's important to feel and nurture that independence, but alterity matters, too. That's the danger I sensed then, and continue to sense now. As Gordon Fellman warns in Rambo and the Dalai Lama, this is not the moment in our history to conquer nature and the "Other," but the moment to learn mutuality. That doesn't mean that the wolf has no place in our world. He does. But we've swung the pendulum too far towards adversarialism, and need to balance his place with a place for mutuality, too.

At amazon.com you will find the following reviews of Women Who Run with Wolves:

"A deeply spiritual book...She honors what is tough, smart and untamed in women. She venerates the female soul." --The Washington Post Book World Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul. "The work of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, rooted in old and deep family rites and in archetypal psychology, recognizes that the soul is not lost, but has been put to sleep....This volume reminds us that we are nature for all our sophistication, that we are still wild, and the recovery of that vitality will itself set us right in the world."
--Thomas Moore Author of Care of the Soul

From Kirkus Reviews , May 15, 1992

A feminist counterpart to Iron John--or, how ``a healthy woman is much like a wolf.'' Estes, a Jungian analyst, believes that a woman's wholeness depends on her returning to the sources of her repressed instinctual nature. To illustrate the ways of the ``wild woman,'' the author draws on myths, legends, and fairy tales from a vast and eclectic range of traditions. This collection of stories may well be the most valuable element of the book, which otherwise reads like unedited transcripts of the workshops Estes leads to encourage women to return to their ``feral'' roots. Each story demonstrates a particular aspect of woman's experience--relationship, creativity, anger, spirituality, etc. Estes finds evidence in the most diverse tales of the necessity for women to reclaim their wildness. The precise nature of this wildness is difficult to fathom, but, at best, it seems to include a genuine capacity to access feelings and to accept one's contradictions, while, at worst, it appears to amount to the kind of self-indulgence that prevailed during the ``me'' generation. Estes claims that her book is for every woman, ``whether you be spicy or somber, regal or roughshod''; but her underlying assumption that every woman is free to abandon what holds her back seems ignorant of social and economic realities. The author provides few concrete examples that might help women understand what she expects them to do, and her prose abounds in generalizations and oddities (``the ambitious woman...who is heartfelt toward her accomplishments'') that further undermine her credibility and her considerable scholarship. Hortatory, ecstatic, and, ultimately, irritating. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

References on Related Topics:

• Sociological Perspectives:The Undergraduate Sociology Journal Volume V, Number 1 / Spring 1999. There's supposed to be a reference to masculine identity. I was looking for "drums." jeanne
• Real Boys, Rescuing our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood An Interview by Bill Bruzy with "Real Boys" author, William Pollack, Ph.D., Harvard University.