Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

In North America, the best known Bluebeard versions are the French and the German. When its cutting work is done, it leaves the woman deadened in feeling, feeling frail to advance her life her ideas and dreams lay at her feet drained of animation. It severs the woman from her intuitive nature. It erupts in the midst of their most soulful and meaningful plans. Stalking the Intruder: The Beginning Initiation This predatory potentate 1 shows up time after time in women's dreams. It is a derisive and murderous antagonist that is born into us, and even with the best parental nurture the intruder's sole assignment is to attempt to turn all crossroads into closed roads. The contra naturam aspect opposes the positive: it is against development, against harmony, and against the wild. While the cause of much human suffering can be traced to negligent fostering, there is also within the psyche naturally an innate contra naturam aspect, an 'against nature' force. One entity in particular, the most deceitful and most powerful fugitive in the psyche, requires our immediate consciousness and containment-and that one is the natural predator. But what shall we do with those inner beings who are quite mad and those who carry out destruction without thought? Even these must be given a place, though one in which they can be contained. Rather than corrupt her natural beauty, our work is to build for all these beings a wildish countryside wherein the artists among them can make, the lovers love, the healers heal. But to do this would halt the dance of wildish lights in a woman's eyes it would halt her heat lightning and arrest all throwing of sparks.

Some psychological technologies suggest we arrest these beings, count them, name them, force them into harness till they shuffle along like vanquished slaves. Bluebeard In a single human being there are many other beings, all with their own values, motives, and devices. Contracting the Power of the Wild Woman, London, Rider, 1992. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés