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Over the last thirty years or so women have been engaged in raising the level of their conscious awareness of their psychological place in the world. In particular they have been more thoughtful of the politics of power in relationships in our daily lives,
whether in race, class or education. Women have begun to believe that women do matter, that biology need not be limiting, and that women do not only need to identify with those who are having a hard time. Most revealing of all was the image that women can be seen, wherever they are, as a third world. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a Jungian analyst and director of studies at the C.G. Jung Institute in Denver, Colorado. She has dedicated the last twenty years to writing this book and collecting fairy tales. Her study has revealed how embedded and denigrating the cultural attitude to women has been over the centuries.
Freudians and Jungians have been fascinated by fairy tales, which hold a transitional place in our cultural world. They spin out their powerful themes about the human condition. Tenaciously the stories persist in a variety of transformations in many cultures and show us the heroic deeds and terrible trials we must endure to effect change. Dr Estés is not only fascinated by the themes, she encourages others to discover them. (Incidentally she is a Cantadora and creator of several audio tapes in the Jung Story Teller Series). This book is a storehouse of a huge range of myths and stories which tell women how to reclaim their feminine power. Dr Estés calls to life the wild neglected places of the feminine psyche and links our contemporary lives with stories such as ‘Bluebeard’, ‘The red shoes’ and ‘Woman with hair of gold’. At first I expected Dr Estés book to enthral me as fairy tales had done when I was a child; I was to have a big surprise. In her trawl she discovers the complex issue of women's nature and enumerates the ‘secrets’ which are at the core of a woman's life and living and often obscured from u