Women Who Run with the Wolves. Clarissa Estés. Summary

This book is a shortened retelling of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s work “Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.” Using linguistic neural networks, we significantly reduced the volume of text while preserving all the main ideas. In every woman lives a powerful instinctive force, full of passionate creativity and enduring knowledge. She is the Wild Woman, personifying women’s instinctive nature. But she is an endangered species. For although the gifts of the wild belong to us from birth, attempts by society to “civilize” us by pushing us into rigid frames drown out the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.

In the book “Running with the Wolves,” Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds the rich cross-cultural myths, fairy tales, folk legends, and stories—many taken from her own traditions—to help women reconnect with the untamed, healthy, prophetic qualities of this instinctive nature. Thanks to the stories and commentary in this remarkable book, we restore, explore, love, and understand the Wild Woman—seeing her as something both magical and healing.

Dr. Estés created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, she presents women’s psychology in its truest sense—knowledge of the soul.