| Clarissa Pinkola Estés | |
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| Born | 27 January 1945 Indiana, United States1 |
| Occupation | Psychoanalyst, poet, post-trauma specialist, author |
| Genres | Depth Psychology, Archetypal Psychology, Analytical Psychology, Traditional medicine, Ethnic Studies, Mythology, Women's Studies, Diversity, Post-traumatic stress disorder, Poetry |
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Clarissa Pinkola Estés (born 27 January 1945) is an American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst.
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Similar to William Carlos Williams and other poets who also worked in the health or other professions in tandem, Estés is a poet who uses her poems throughout her psychoanalytic books, spokenword audios, and stage performances as expressive therapy for others. She is also a post-trauma recovery specialist and psychoanalsyst who has practiced clinically for 41 years. Her doctorate, from the Union Institute & University, is in ethno-clinical psychology, the study of social and psychological patterns of cultural and tribal groups. She often speaks as "distinguished visiting scholar" and "diversity scholar" at universities, most recently to young engineers at Colorado School of Mines. She is the author of many books on the life of the soul, and her work is published in 30 languages, most recently Persian, Turkish, Chinese, and Serbian. Her book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 145 weeks.
As a post-trauma specialist, Estés began her work in the 1960s at Edward Hines Jr. Veterans Hospital in Hines, Illinois. There she worked with WWI, WWII, Korean and Vietnam war soldiers who were living with quadraplegia, incapacitated by loss of, either/or, both arms and legs. She has worked at other facilities caring for severely injured 'cast-away' children, 'shell-shocked' war veterans (now called Post Trauma Distress Syndrome), and their families. Her teaching of writing in prisons began in the early 1970s at the Men's Penitentiary in Colorado; the Federal Women's Prison at Dublin, California, and in other 'locked institutions' throughout the Southwest.
Estés ministers in the fields of childbearing loss, surviving families of murder victims, as well as critical incident work. She served at natural disaster sites, developing post-trauma recovery protocol for earthquake survivors in Armenia. Since then, her protocol is used to deputize citizen helpers to do post-trauma work on site and for the months and years yet to come. She served Columbine High School and community after the massacre, 1999-2003. She continues to work with 9-11 survivors and survivor families on both east and west coasts.
Estés served as appointee by two Governors to the Colorado State Grievance Board (1993–2006) where she was elected Chair. She is a board member of the Authors Guild, New York; an advisory board member for National Writers Union, New York; an advisory board member of National Coalition Against Censorship, New York; and a board member of the Maya Angelou Minority Health Foundation at Wake Forest Medical School. She is an advisor to El Museo de las Americas, Colorado; a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review; and a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Estés, "a former "hard-scrabble" welfare mother"[1] is the recipient of numerous awards for her life's work, including the first Joseph Campbell Keeper of the Lore Award for her work as La cantadora; and for her written work, the Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis; and Catholic Press Association award for her writing. She received the Las Primeras Award, "The First of Her Kind" from the Mexican American Women's Foundation, District of Columbia. She is a 2006 inductee into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame which celebrates women "change agents" who have had international influence.
Estés is Managing Editor for TheModeratevoice.com, a news and political blog where she also writes on issues of culture, soul, and politics. She is also a columnist on issues of social justice, spirituality and culture in her column entitled El Rio Debajo del Rio ("The River Underneath the River") on the National Catholic Reporter website.
She is controversial for proposing that both assimilation and holding to ethnic traditions are the ways to contribute to a creative culture and to a soul-based civility. She successfully helped to petition the Library of Congress, as well as worldwide psychoanalytic institutes, to rename their studies and categorizations formerly called, among other things, "psychology of the primitives", to respectful and descriptive names, according to ethnic group, religion, culture, etc.
Estés' Guadalupe Foundation currently funds literacy projects in Queens, New York City, in Madagascar - providing printed local folktales, healthcare and hygiene information for people in their own language. These texts are then used for learning to read and write. Estés testifies before state and federal legislatures on welfare reform, education and school violence, child protection, mental health, environment, licensing of professionals, immigration, and other quality of life and soul issues.
"I was raised in the now nearly vanished oral and ethnic traditions of my families. I am a first-generation American who grew up in a rural village, population 600, near the Great Lakes. Of Mexican mestiza and majority Magyar and minority Swabian tribal heritages, I come from immigrant and refugee families who could not read or write, or who did so haltingly. Much of my writing is influenced by my family people who were farmers, shepherds, hopsmeisters, wheelwrights, weavers, orchardists, tailors, cabinet makers, lacemakers, knitters, and horsemen and horsewomen from the Old Countries." (excerpt from Forte è la Donna: dalla Grande Madre Bennedetta, insegnamenti per i nostri tempi (Sperling & Kupfer/ Frassinelli, May 2011, Milano, Italy)
"We are all los inmigrantes, the Soul is The First Immigrant: The Soul cannot be held back by any imaginary boundary drawn against it; not by mountain ranges, not by rivers, nor by human scorn. The Soul, goes everywhere, like an old woman in her right mind, going anywhere she wishes, saying whatever she wants, bending to mend whatever is within her reach. Wherever she goes, the Soul brings new life." - from The Dangerous Old Woman audiobook
"There is no ethnic group on the face of this earth that has not been slaughtered; viz Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons. When, after a conflict, the best balanced leaders who have a stake in the future of all persons, are bypassed, and instead power is seized by the angriest and most grudge-holding, whose greatest stake is in the past… without new consciousness, and without strong reconciling actions... thus erupts a horrible recycling of living out the least of what is human in this world." from "Letter To The Prince on the Anniversary of Kristallnacht"
""As artist-in-residence in schools, I find whereas children used to dream bear, wolf, tiger as both friends and foes, and often… now, so so many children are dreaming Machine; gigantic stomping splints and walking piers of glittering mutant metal.... " - from essay "Wild Wolf/ Wild Soul" in Comeback Wolves, eds G. Wockner, L. Prichett
"There are not two 'Ms to governing, as many PolySci courses have taught: 'Money and Management.' There are three M's. The third one is Mercy. The third "M" constitutes the difference between a country and a corporation." from testimony before Federal Ways and Means Committee on Social Programs, Washington, 1996 Congressional Record.
""Nature and human beings are not separate. You can be sure that when the land and creatures are wounded by humans, that those humans are copying their own psychic wounds into the earth and animals as well; what is wounded and without thought, wounds others..." from essay "Massacre of the Dreamers, in Untie The Strong Woman book"
"The wounding of land and creatures reaches to the dream world... and beyond it to impoverish the dreamers as well. Yet there is still time to intervene... but the time is right this instant..." ibid
""All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below." from the poem Abre La Puerta in Theatre of the Imagination (Sounds True), also for Kol Nidre at shul
"Do not lose heart, we were made for these times..." from Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times
""The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase." from Women Who Run With the Wolves (Ballantine/ Bertelsmann 1992, 1996) (p. 14)
"Just because a woman is silent does not mean she agrees…" - from The Dangerous Old Woman audiobook
""If logic were everything, all men would ride sidesaddle…" - from Women Who Run With The Wolves
"Some people mistake being loving for being a sap. Quite the contrary, the most loving people are often the most fierce and the most acutely armed for battle... for they care about preserving and protecting poetry, symphonic song, ideas, the elements, creatures, inventions, hopes and dreams, dances and holiness... those goodly endeavors that cannot be allowed to perish from this earth, else humanity itself would perish..." - from The Dangerous Old Woman audiobook
''If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith… there is yet time." - from Women Who Run with the Wolves
Estés is a spoken word artist in poetry, stories, blessings and psychoanalytic commentary. Her many audio works, published by Sounds True, are available as CDs and mp3s and have been broadcast over numerous National Public Radio and community public radio stations throughout Canada and the United States.