What’s in it for me? A path that leads to your inner power.
In Jungian psychoanalysis, archetypes are symbols or patterns that are common to our collective unconsciousness, and that shape the way we act and think. For women, there is one archetype that guides us on the path to power, authenticity, instinct, and intuition; it’s also the archetype that patriarchal societies have worked for generations to stifle.
It is the Wild Woman.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian psychoanalyst, takes the Wild Woman archetype as her subject. She then illuminates, through the framework of myth and fairy tale, how women can work with this archetype to access power, growth, and fulfillment.
This Blink to Women Who Run with the Wolves will introduce the archetype of the Wild Woman, and summarize the learnings gleaned from four key tales – the stories of La Loba, Vasalisa, Bluebeard, and the Ugly Duckling.
Meet the Wild Woman
She is a familiar figure from old songs and stories: the witch, the healer, the shape-shifter, the forest-dweller, the woman who runs with the wolves.
In Hungarian, she is called Roszomak, the Wolverine; in Guatemalan, Humana del Niebla, the Mist Being; in Japanese, Amateratsu Omikami, the Bringer of Light. Every culture, at every time in history, has told stories about this fierce, powerful woman.
When women read about her, they may feel a primal echo. That is because the Wild Woman of the stories lies latent in their psyche. All women are in sisterhood with the wild feminine, even though society and patriarchy conspire to sever this connection.
Sometimes, women can taste fleeting glimpses of this wildness – during pregnancy, the primal, animal experience of birth and nursing; through passionate romance; through being in nature; through music and dance. Once a woman reconnects with the Wild Woman archetype, she becomes unstoppable. Her creativity, inspiration, sexuality, and intuition all blossom and thrive.
What are the telltale signs that the connection with this wildest part of the psyche has frayed? Women who aren’t in touch with the Wild Woman often report feeling fatigued, unfocused, doubtful, and out of step with their own inner tempo. A woman who has lost her connection to wildness is unhealthy. A healthy woman, meanwhile, is like a wolf: fierce, loyal, roving, attentive, territorial, following her gut.
In Jungian psychoanalysis, the Wild Woman is both the female soul and the source of the raw feminine. Jungians see stories as medicine; the way they play with archetypes, symbols, and patterns offers a framework for healing and learning. In that sense, the stories of the Wild Woman are far more than a string of words – if you let them be, they can also be maps that guide you back to your own wild inner power.
Your wildness may be buried, but it’s indestructible
In fact, in myth, and in fairy tale, women and wolves are often connected. We see this everywhere from Red Riding Hood to ancient stories of babies who were abandoned at birth, then breastfed by she-wolves until they could fend for themselves.
In tales told in Mexico and among Native Americans, there is a place mentioned only in whispers: it is a place in the desert where, through the barrier of time, the spirits of women meet and join with the spirits of wolves. There is a figure mentioned in these stories, too: La Loba, the she-wolf.
La Loba goes by many names: she is also La Huesera, the Bone Woman, and La Trapera, the gatherer. She is a collector of clean, white animal bones. She accepts the bones of vultures and coyotes, but her preference is for wolves. Once she has gathered enough bones to assemble a full skeleton, she thinks about what song she will sing. When she has settled on the perfect song, she stands over the skeleton and begins the melody. As she sings, muscle and sinew return to the bones, then flesh, then wiry gray hair – until the form of a wolf stands before her again. She sings a soul back into the wolf, and then it lopes away through the pueblos of the southwestern plains.
What can we learn from the story of La Loba?
Let’s begin with the bones. They are indestructible, and life force is held within them. The same goes for you – the deepest parts of your nature are, like bones, indestructible.
When La Loba sings over the bones, she uses her soul-voice – the voice that speaks true power and true need. You can connect to your soul voice by descending deeply into love and emotion until the desire for wild connection overflows you. This is solitary work, a labor carried out in the desert of your own psyche.
The figure of La Loba stands on the intersection between rationality and myth; she is between worlds. In the psyche, Jung called this place between worlds, or planes of consciousness, the collective unconscious. Think of it as a place where two rivers meet, where the flow of everyday life can become permeated with inspiration, visions, and dreams from a deeper-flowing source of symbols and knowledge. A woman can arrive at this place and meet La Loba through deeply creative and spiritual acts: meditation, chanting, drumming, painting, intentional solitude.
Whether your connection to the Wild Woman is strong or weak, know that La Loba is at work inside of you. There, she is guarding your bones – the wolf bones of your wild self. Within you is the song that brings flesh and life to the bones and resurrects the wild spirit. Within you, and every woman, is a wolf.
Psychic villains can unlock a woman’s intuition
Each human psyche contains multiple beings. Not all of these beings are easily tamed, and not all of these beings wish us well. But before trying to banish them, we’d be wise to think, What if each of these less desirable beings also had some spark of good in them, some lesson to teach us? Instead of banishing these malevolent entities, the Wild Woman learns to work with them.
Let’s talk about one of the most fearsome beings that lives within us: the natural predator, the contra natura aspect of the psyche. Contra natura means against nature – the predator is the force that wants to sever the woman’s connection to her deepest, wildest self. One such predator is the fairy-tale villain Bluebeard.
Bluebeard courts three sisters. He then takes the youngest as his wife, and spirits her back to his grand castle. When he leaves on a hunting expedition, he tells the woman to make herself at home, and that she can open any door in the house she likes … except for one. She invites her sisters to visit, and they persuade her to unlock the forbidden door. Behind it, she finds a room filled with blackened bones and pyramids of skulls – Bluebeard’s former wives. Worse, she drops the key into a puddle of blood and stains it. When Bluebeard sees the red key, he knows what has happened and roars that his new wife will be next. But the sisters had prepared for this reaction and bid their brothers to come protect them. Together, they vanquish the predator.
In this story, the youngest sister is the naive woman whose instincts are not fully formed. Her brush with the predator is an initiatory rite through which her sense and intuition are shocked awake. In the same way, we need to listen to our “older sisters” – the voices in our heads that warn us away from harm, whether from addiction, unsuitable relationships, or unfulfilling roles.
The naive younger sister is tempted into marriage by the pleasures of the ego: the promise of a large house and fine gowns, a taste of independence and freedom. What she finds is a false freedom – she can go anywhere except one room. Curiosity is the force that awakens her to reality. And questions are the keys that open the doors hidden in our psyches.
There is a twisted parallel here between Bluebeard and La Loba: La Loba guards the bones of the woman’s soul, while Bluebeard breaks a woman’s psyche down to its bones. But it’s important for the young wife to witness the murder scene piled with bones. It’s only when a woman looks at the parts of her psyche that have been destroyed – perhaps her instincts, or her nature – that she can see what’s at stake and psychically reassert herself.
At the story’s conclusion, the once-naive, now-initiated woman can call on her brothers. In the psyche, the brothers aren’t necessarily masculine; they simply represent the forces a woman can find in herself when she opens her eyes to how she is threatened. They’re her fierce, instinctual response to the predator. When a woman surfaces from her naivete, she is stronger and more powerful than before. In fact, she can be a predator herself if the need arises.
On the journey to wisdom, learn what to let go of – and what to keep
The slavic story of Vasalisa begins with a mother on her deathbed. She gifts her daughter, Vasalisa, a doll. Vasalisa’s father remarries, and no matter how hard Vasalisa tries to please her new stepmother and stepsisters, they mistreat her.
One night, they send Vasalisa into the woods to beg for more fire from the witch, Baba Yaga. Vasalisa goes and takes her doll in her pocket. At every fork in the road, Vasalisa gives her doll breadcrumbs, and it instructs her whether to turn left or right. When she arrives at Baba Yaga’s hut, the witch proposes a deal – she tells Vasalisa she will give her fire if she can separate a pile of dirt from a pile of poppy seeds.
Vasalisa despairs, but the doll performs this impossible task for her. Baba Yaga is impressed and asks Vasalisa how she came to be so wise and skilful. By the blessing of my mother, Vasalisa replies. The witch is incensed – she doesn’t want blessings mentioned in her house – so she sends Vasalisa home with a skull whose eyes are aflame. Vasalisa is scared of the skull, but she listens to it when it tells her not to throw it away. At the end, the skull burns the stepmother and stepsisters to cinders.
This is a story about the gift of intuition being passed from one generation of women to the next. Baba Yaga is the wild, knowing woman, and Vasalisa must pass her initiation rite in order to step into her own powers of intuition and instinct.
The initiation begins with the death of the too-good mother. As women mature, the good mother of the psyche eventually becomes the too-good mother, who is overprotective and prevents us from meeting the challenges that will allow us to deepen and grow. She must be allowed to dwindle away.
Next, Vasalisa must confront the crude shadows of her psyche – the cruel, provocative forces that are represented by her step-family. Vasalisa tries to appease these shadow forces. In the tale, she works hard to please her new mother and sisters, but she learns that they will not be placated with obedience. In truth, every woman has these shadows lurking in her own psyche; the stepmother represents the exploitative and exclusionary aspects of character. These must be confronted head-on.
Vasalisa also has to navigate in the dark to Baba Yaga’s hut. As she walks, she heeds her intuition – symbolized here through the doll. And as she nurtures her intuition with breadcrumbs, it grows stronger. Then Vasalisa comes face to face with the wild hag. Vasalisa is scared of Baba Yaga, but by confronting the witch’s power, she sees the potential for that same power in herself – and finally begins to free herself from the role of the compliant, helpless maiden.
Before Vasalisa takes on the powers of Baba Yaga, she must tend to the witch's house. The time she spends cleaning and sorting everything represents the necessary task of tending to the inner space of intuition, instinct, and spirituality. It also underscores the importance of nurturing the intuition’s ability to distinguish between different matters – to sort the valuable (poppy seeds) from the irrelevant (the dirt).
Finally, Vasalisa accepts the gruesome burden of the skull, which represents power and vision. As she carries it, she realizes the skull is actually neither gruesome nor burdensome. It’s a guiding light, with the power to cleanse the parts of her life that don’t serve her and illuminate a new path.
Find community with other wild women
The tale of the Ugly Duckling is a familiar one: among a pack of fluffy yellow ducklings, one stands out. His siblings tease this ugly duckling. Even his mother eventually tires of him and tells him she wishes he would go away.
He leaves, and is taunted for his ugliness everywhere he goes. In the winter, the river he’s paddling in freezes over. A kindhearted farmer rescues him before he freezes to death. As spring arrives, the duckling sees a flock of swans – swans he has already longingly observed from a distance. Feeling like he has nothing left to lose, he flaps over to them.
To his shock, they embrace him as one of their own. When he looks at his reflection in the water, he sees he has shed his childish coat and transformed into an elegant white bird. He was a swan all along.
In this story, the ugly duckling is an exile. Many wild women feel as if they, too, are in exile. They come from families who don’t understand them; they fail to find friends who truly support them or lovers who fully satisfy them.
It’s significant that the story begins in childhood, with a duckling. In many cultures, female children are expected to be obedient and conforming, to align with their family’s values and ideas. Young girls who do not fit this perfect mold often feel the sting of their family’s disappointment.
The duck mother is psychically divided, torn between wanting to mother her outcast child and wanting to conform. Eventually, her desire for conformity wins out and she rejects her child. The duck mother represents the internal mother; in order for the internal mother to have the courage to align with her child over societal pressure, she in turn needs to be mothered and nurtured.
Exile is a lonely, isolating place – represented by the duckling’s entrapment in the frozen river. To be frozen, unaffected by emotion, can feel like a form of self-protection or even empowerment. But it isn’t. An icy attitude freezes the creative fire at the heart of the Wild Woman.
To free yourself from icy exile, pay attention to the ache of longing. What we long to be is often what we ought to be and what, in fact, we are – as the duckling’s longing for the flock of beautiful swans shows. Not only did the duckling long to be a swan; the swan mother, the true mother and Wild Woman, yearned for her child.
Exile, as we see from this tale, is not a great misfortune but a great boon. If you find yourself in this position, don’t mourn because you have failed to conform to a mold. Rejoice because you have sheltered an essential part of your soul and kept it alive. And if you’re still waiting to find your pack of swans, don’t give up hope – learn a lesson from wild nature herself, and take heart knowing that rebirth and spring always lie ahead.
Final summary
The Wild Woman who exists in myth and fairy tale also exists within the psyche. When women connect with this archetype, they can awaken their instinct, power, and community.