Read Yes
Length 608
Quick Review This is an incredible psychoanalysis of women and the wild woman through storytelling. It’s an incredibly diverse and rich feminist text.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés is known for a lot of things. She has her PhD and is a well known Jungian analyst with storytelling experience reaching to her cultural roots as a Latina. She combines all expertise into Women Who Run With The Wolves a groundbreaking feminist work, which has remained popular since it was published over twenty years ago in 1992.
Women Who Run With The Wolves is a search for woman’s most inner woman, feelings, and history. Throughout history women have been molded and suppressed. Estés argues it is important to look at women throughout history and story to find their most quintessential essence. She believes it is important for women to be in touch with their inner wild woman, or they will go crazy in their suppressed role.
The book is a collection of fourteen stories from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Estés tells the story as traditionally as possible at the beginning of each chapter. After each recounting, she analyses every aspect of the story through a psychoanalytical and feminist lense. Each story offers an important learning opportunity for women to be in touch with themselves.
There is a reoccurring theme of life-death-life mother across many cultures. In today’s society, we often are confronted with the idea of life and death. Estés reiterates the idea of life-death-life as missing from most accounts of the evolution of life in Euro-centric culture. I think the missing reoccurrence of life is an equivalent to the pieces of ourselves as women we have lost of the years and generations of being molded into cultural ideals.
Women Who Run With The Wolves is not necessarily an easy read, but it is an important.
P.S. There would have been far more quotes, but I would have ended up infringing on copyright laws because I would have quoted the entire book.
Memorable Quotes
“This Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.”
“This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions.”
“So many women themselves are afraid of women’s power.”
Title: Women Who Run With The Wolves
Author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.
Publisher: Rider
Copyright: 1992
ISBN: 9781846041099
