Women Who Run with the Wolves

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than 2.7 million copies sold! • “A deeply spiritual book [that] honors what is tough, smart and untamed in women.”—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. 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.

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.