Women Who Run with the Wolves

You know someone like this, or you've been her yourself: the woman who wakes up early, takes care of the kids, her aging father, her husband, her job and her church group, and reaches the end of the day not knowing what she likes. She still smiles, she still handles everything, but inside she feels a kind of strange silence, as if some part of her had been left behind.

This is the feeling that Clarissa Pinkola Estés's book starts from. Her thesis is that many women were taught to adapt to others so much that they ended up losing touch with their own instinctive nature. The author gives this forgotten part the name Wild Woman.

Wild here doesn't mean rude or out of control. It means natural, intuitive, connected to what is alive in you. The book is an attempt to help you find that part again through ancient stories, which the author retells and comments on with a psychoanalyst's eye.

The Wild Woman is not a person, she is an archetype, a word used in Jung's psychology to talk about images and patterns that show up in many cultures. For the author, this figure represents the part of a woman that knows how to sniff out what is true, say no, create, rest and protect what she loves.

The wolf comes in as a symbol because, according to her, wolves and women share similar traits: acute sensitivity, a strong bond with their young and with the group, the ability to endure exhaustion, and a great need for space of their own. In both cases, the author reminds us, they have been misunderstood and persecuted.

It's best to read this as a poetic comparison, not as biology. What the book offers is an image, a lens for seeing your own exhaustion, and each reader decides whether it helps or not.

The book's method is to tell tales. Instead of listing advice, the author retells narratives from many origins, such as peasant stories, fairy tales and legends, and then interprets each scene step by step. The idea is that the story speaks through images, and that the reader recognizes something of her own in it.

Think of the grandmother who, instead of lecturing, told a story from the farm and let the moral appear on its own. It works the same way: the tale enters through the imagination, and later we realize it was about us. For Jungian psychology, ancient symbols show universal ways of facing loss and new beginnings.

Readers who prefer data and experiments will find this strange. But those who accept the game may find, in the stories, a way of talking about pain and desire that technical language often lets slip away.