Author: Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype

The below is an excerpt from the podcast to give you an idea on the material.  There are two parts in the series and I highly recommend you looking into the Sounds True website and getting the entire interview.  Lynn

http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast/?p=1596#bottom

Sounds True Insights at the Edge Transcripts 9/1/10 4:08 PM

Page 1 of 11

Insights at the Edge Podcast

Author: Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today I am speaking with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés,

an internationally recognized scholar, award winning poet, diplomate Senior Jungian Psychoanalyst, and

Cantadora, keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition.

“CPE” as I call Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, or “Dr. E”, recorded Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and

Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype at Sounds True back in 1989. She recorded this audio program with us

three years before the book ever reached the bookstores or even found its way into the hands of publishers.

Now Dr. E is launching her masterwork, over three decades in the writing. The Dangerous Old Woman:

Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype, is launching for the first time ever as an online event

series at Sounds True… beginning on April 6th. Here’s my conversation with CPE about The Dangerous Old

Woman.

TS: CPE, I want to begin by talking about something you call “a psychology of women’s giftedness.” This

idea that there needs to be psychology of women’s giftedness and how this undergirds both your previous

work, Women Who Run with the Wolves and now, The Dangerous Old Woman. Talk a little bit about this.

What do you mean “the psychology of women’s giftedness?”

CPE: If you read psychological theories from the last one-hundred years, you find in the psychology that’s

published, there is an emphasis on pathology, psychopathology, and an emphasis on what’s wrong with

everyone. Very little is said about the unique qualities of giftedness.

The basic premise of The Dangerous Old Woman as in Women Who Run with the Wolves is that all women

are born gifted.

I know the culture wants to sideline groups of people and say they really aren’t gifted. But the culture is

holding up crabbed comparison list of ‘attributes of giftedness’ that does not accurately cover the full

spectrum nor the nuances of giftedness.

Many people in school are in fact rewarded for ‘learning to sit still,’ for instance, as though that is a talent…

rather than learning to imagine or unleashing their imagination… which is a profound talent that is handed

down. Even if such a gift seemed to jump generations, or not surface because of active suppression…

imagination is definitely a talent that is part of the legacy and heritage of one’s own bloodlines.

TS: So if psychology is normally about psychopathology, how does it change our view when we look at

giftedness instead?

CPE: We would place an emphasis on what is within the psyche that is generous of its own nature… of the

soul in other words.. that flows like a headwaters of the Amazon. The knowings and imaginations of the soul

are not little tributaries; they roar, they rise up… they’re not meant to be a dammed river that is backed up

and stagnant behind a great concrete wall.

We would consider the most natural state of the human to be flowing with ideas and useful matters, to rush

and eddy and to rise up into the sky just like a real river does when it’s fully alive.

Giftedness is not a quiescent experience; it is an experience of a golden fuse at the center of the psyche

flashing, signaling, giving off energic impulses in every direction. Those creative impulses are from the soul:

they are received and interpreted by the brain and what some people might call the “ego”. But they are

seated in the soul and they come through the ego freely… if the ego is not dammed nor set into a rut of only

“this is good and this is not good” and “you are good, but you are not.”