Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-51% $10.75$10.75
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$9.04$9.04
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Jenson Books Inc
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
Audible sample Sample
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype Paperback – August 22, 1995
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
Book club pick for Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf
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. Clarissa Pinkola 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.
- Print length560 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateAugust 22, 1995
- Dimensions6.05 x 1.13 x 9.18 inches
- ISBN-100345396812
- ISBN-13978-0345396815
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- It means to establish territory, to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.Highlighted by 7,042 Kindle readers
- They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.Highlighted by 6,812 Kindle readers
- When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes.Highlighted by 5,623 Kindle readers
- What stands behind? What is not as it appears? What do I know deep in my ovarios that I wish I did not know? What of me has been killed, or lays dying?Highlighted by 5,410 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“I am grateful to Women Who Run with the Wolves and to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The work shows the reader how glorious it is to be daring, to be caring, and to be women. Everyone who can read should read this book.”—Maya Angelou
“An inspiring book, the ‘vitamins for the soul’ [for] women who are cut off from their intuitive nature.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Stands out from the pack . . . a joy and sparkle in [the] prose . . . This book will become a bible for women interested in doing deep work. . . . It is a road map of all the pitfalls, those familiar and those horrifically unexpected, that a woman encounters on the way back to her instinctual self. Wolves . . . is a gift.”—Los Angeles Times
“A mesmerizing voice . . . dramatic storytelling she learned at the knees of her [immigrant] aunts.”—Newsweek
“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 the Inside Flap
--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. Estes 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. Estes 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 Estes, 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 the Back Cover
--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
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Singing Over the Bones
Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.
Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.
It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous.
My life and work as a Jungian psychoanalyst, poet, and cantadora, keeper of the old stories, have taught me that women’s flagging vitality can be restored by extensive “psychic-archeological” digs into the ruins of the female underworld. By these methods we are able to recover the ways of the natural instinctive psyche, and through its personification in the Wild Woman archetype we are able to discern the ways and means of woman’s deepest nature. The modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue.
The title of this book, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, came from my study of wildlife biology, wolves in particular. The studies of the wolves Canis lupus and Canis rufus are like the history of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails.
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.
So that is where the concept of the Wild Woman archetype first crystallized for me, in the study of wolves. I’ve studied other creatures as well, such as bear, elephant, and the soul-birds—butterflies. The characteristics of each species give abundant metaphoric hints into what is knowable about the feminine instinctual psyche.
The wild nature passed through my spirit twice, once by my birth to a passionate Mexican-Spanish bloodline, and later, through adoption by a family of fiery Hungarians. I was raised up near the Michigan state line, surrounded by woodlands, orchards, and farmland and near the Great Lakes. There, thunder and lightning were my main nutrition. Cornfields creaked and spoke aloud at night. Far up in the north, wolves came to the clearings in moonlight, prancing and praying. We could all drink from the same streams without fear.
Although I did not call her by that name then, my love for Wild Woman began when I was a little child. I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.
The river always called to be visited after dark, the fields needed to be walked in so they could make their rustle-talk. Fires needed to be built in the forest at night, and stories needed to be told outside the hearing of grown-ups.
I was lucky to be brought up in Nature. There, lightning strikes taught me about sudden death and the evanescence of life. Mice litters showed that death was softened by new life. When I unearthed “Indian beads,” fossils from the loam, I understood that humans have been here a long, long time. I learned about the sacred art of self-decoration with monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
A wolf mother killed one of her mortally injured pups; this taught a hard compassion and the necessity of allowing death to come to the dying. The fuzzy caterpillars which fell from their branches and crawled back up again taught single-mindedness. Their tickle-walking on my arm taught how skin can come alive. Climbing to the tops of trees taught what sex would someday feel like.
My own post-World War II generation grew up in a time when women were infantilized and treated as property. They were kept as fallow gardens . . . but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind. Though what they wrote was unauthorized, women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrecognized, it fed the soul anyway. Women had to beg for the instruments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and closets.
Dancing was barely tolerated, if at all, so they danced in the forest where no one could see them, or in the basement, or on the way out to empty the trash. Self-decoration caused suspicion. Joyful body or dress increased the danger of being harmed or sexually assaulted. The very clothes on one’s shoulders could not be called one’s own.
It was a time when parents who abused their children were simply called “strict,” when the spiritual lacerations of profoundly exploited women were referred to as “nervous breakdowns,” when girls and women who were tightly girdled, tightly reined, and tightly muzzled were called “nice,” and those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment or two of life were branded “bad.”
So like many women before and after me, I lived my life as a disguised criatura, creature. Like my kith and kin before me, I swagger staggered in high heels, and I wore a dress and hat to church. But my fabulous tail often fell below my hemline, and my ears twitched until my hat pitched, at the very least, down over both my eyes, and sometimes clear across the room.
I’ve not forgotten the song of those dark years, hambre del alma, the song of the starved soul. But neither have I forgotten the joyous canto hondo, the deep song, the words of which come back to us when we do the work of soulful reclamation.
Like a trail through a forest which becomes more and more faint and finally seems to diminish to a nothing, traditional psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman. Traditional psychology is often spare or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire. This is what has driven my work on the Wild Woman archetype for over two decades.
A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. Instead, the goal must be the retrieval and succor of women’s beauteous and natural psychic forms.
Fairy tales, myths, and stones provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks we all are following are those of the wild and innate instinctual Self.
I call her Wild Woman, for those very words, wild and woman, create llamar o tocar a la puerta, the fairy tale knock at the door of the deep female psyche. Llamar o tocar a la puerta means literally to play upon the instrument of the name in order to open a door. It means using words that summon up the opening of a passageway. No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.
When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghosty from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her; we know she belongs to us and we to her.
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (August 22, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 560 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345396812
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345396815
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.05 x 1.13 x 9.18 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #13,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Folklore & Mythology Studies
- #23 in Spiritualism
- #75 in Mental & Spiritual Healing
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. is an award-winning poet, diplomate senior jungian psychoanalyst, and a cantadora (keeper of the old stories) in the Hispanic tradition. She has been in private practice for twenty-five years and is former executive director of the C. G. Jung Center for Research and Education in the United States. The author of The Gift of Story and an eleven-volume series of bestselling audio works published by Sounds True in Boulder, Colorado, Dr. Estés heads the C. P Estés Guadalupe Foundation, a human rights organization that has as one of its nascent missions the broadcasting of strengthening stories via shortwave radio to trouble spots throughout the world.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
It sat on my wish list for months. It wasn't until I read about it on during my studies on society and women that I decided to finally borrowed the book from the library.
I am glad I did. Two chapters into the book I realized: I don't want to borrow this book, I must own it.
"Women Who Run with the Wolves" is well written and makes you stop, look, listen, and pay attention with your soul. You will need time to read this book to get its full value. It is not reading time that makes it a long read, it is thinking time. This book will address the feelings, thoughts and emotions that you have at the core of your existence. It is a starting point to being honest with yourself.
In the simplest of terms it is the handbook on womanhood, intuition, and creativity. Many books on being a woman or understanding a woman seem to tell you about women and womanhood from the outside looking in. This book starts at the core of a woman and shows you layer by layer what the essence of a woman is all about. It is honest and can help a lot of woman and girls understand themselves and live fuller and more meaningful lives.
It addresses our needs, joys, fears, hopes, dreams, emotions, creativity, intellect, intuition, customs, views on our self, and society. It hits so close to home that it will feel as if Dr. Estes wrote this book specifically for you. She is like a mother sitting you down and sharing her knowledge with you one beautiful word at a time.
I enjoyed the stories and myths that were added to this book from various cultures. It is a great way to understand how ways of being are transferred from generation to generation. She shows us the positive and the negative.
The book shows that although women are from various cultures, backgrounds, and races that at the core we are similar in experiences, fears, and love. We have a bond that crosses all these lines. Dr. Estes's book helps to connect the dots.
It addressed unanswered questions in the back of my mind and uncovered feelings that were hidden. I slowly found ways to untangle other emotions and thoughts that I deemed crazy but were normal and shared with women across time. As a result look at myself and other women with new understanding.
Giving this book to a young woman will be a gift that she will cherish and use throughout her adulthood. I have given copies of this book to women and many have called me to talk about it. We were able to talk about things women don't usually share and help each other. The book is an excellent bridge to create and deepen bonds with other women.
I have been stopped in the street and at restaurants by people who are intrigued at the title and my presence when reading it. I have met women who have finished the book and gave me their thoughts on how it has helped them.
I would like to thank Dr. Estes for taking the time and having the love in her heart to write this book. It is a book that will help create more stronger and grounded women.
It is a book that I will carry with me always
Additionally, keep in mind that the author comes from a more expressive and descriptive culture. One whose language actually has more unique words than the English language. Additionally, there is a different and deeper sense of passion. If you truly want new insights, perspectives, and "aha" moments, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and to let your mind expand to embrace new ideas and new perspectives and new patterns of thinking.
One negative review mentions the author's hubris found in the introduction. I find two things at play here: 1. the necessity of any author to communicate to the reader their qualifications to speak on a particular subject and 2. the importance of modeling pride and self-confidence as it is significant to the rest of the work. I personally want to know the background of an author and what makes them uniquely qualified to speak/write about their subject expertise. I also believe her to be modeling what a strong, proud woman looks and acts like. It may be off-putting initially because many of us have been brought up to accept strength and pride as masculine traits that are not culturally admirable in women. She is not always soft, deflecting, and feminine but exercises her masculine energy, too.
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2023
Top reviews from other countries
For me, it leads me to some serious reflection and deep insight work and I KNOW when I have to put it down. Truly, a book has never spoke to every chapter I've ever lived in my life while blowing to bits every question mark I've ever held over myself. Please read this book ladies. And in my opinion would be highly beneficial for men to read too. It's a book for life regardless of gender and a map in your hands that will guide you to all of the parts of your soul ever lost, ever dimmed or ever taken from you. Thank you a thousand times to the author for giving this unprecedented gift to the whole world.
Don't allow the dehumanising consumer society destroy your inner being.