Dancing with Wolves

Abstract

Wolves have born the burden of humankind's intense hatred of the wild in the name of civilization. Our collective projections on the wolf have brought their populations to near extinction. This paper explores our “dance” with the wolf, one that has seen an extraordinary turnabout in the past few decades. Wolf reintroduction counters the animal's extermination. Our history with the corporeal wolf is reviewed as well as the archetypal reality of the human psyche that the wolf has had to bear, which we must come to terms with in ourselves if we, the wolf, and other creatures of the wilderness are to survive.

Keywords:

• Renée Askins
• beasts
• dreams
• C. G. Jung
• Jack London
• Barry Lopez
• Cesar Milan
• Farley Mowat
• nature
• wilderness
• wildlife
• wolf
• Yellowstone

Notes

^1. An earlier version of this paper was presented on March 2, 2012, at the annual North/South Conference of Jungian Analysts held in Pasadena, California.

^2. In a paper titled “Wilderness in North America: The Call of the Wild” (2010) I spoke of the life and work of the early Canadian environmentalist Archie Belaney/Grey Owl, who turned from being a trapper of beavers to a passionate advocate for their preservation. An expanded version of this paper, “Jung, Wilderness, and the Call of the Wild,” will be published by Psychological Perspectives later in 2013.

^3. A more challenging educational task was faced by federal trapper Carter Niemeyer who worked for Animal Damage Control in Montana in the late 1980s. As wolves migrated down into the state from Canada, residents imagined that any livestock death was due to wolves. Niemeyer's investigations proved otherwise. “It is a fact that wolves kill so few livestock that the predators barely register on the pie chart of the U. S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Statistics Service. I wasn't finding that wolves were as evil as everyone thought” (2010, 178).

^4. Robert Franklin Leslie (1974) wrote about the relationship his Native American friend Gregory Tah-Kloma had with the alpha female of a wolf pack in the British Columbia wilderness. Three issues of the 2011 Jungian journal Psychological Perspectives (volume 54, numbers 2, 3, and 4) featured Winifred Sharp's three-part story of an Indian boy, Two Toes, who is inadvertently left behind by his tribe when he goes on his vision quest. Two Toes lives with a pack of wolves for several years before finding his way back to his tribe.

^5. For a more comprehensive summary of the effects of wolf reintroduction, see Chapter 7, “The Wolf Effect,” in Smith's and Ferguson's Decade of the Wolf (2005).

^6. The new ghost wolf, that which brings balance to ecosystems, has had an effect on some Jungians as well. In particular, Clarissa Pinkola Estés credits the wolf for her work on the wild woman archetype expressed through the many stories in her well-known book. She writes, “The title of this book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype came from my study of wildlife biology, wolves in particular” (1992, 4).

^7. Freud had an adult patient who recalled a dream that terrified him. The dream was of a pack of wolves in a tree outside his window when he was about four years old. Freud came to call the patient “The Wolf Man,” and he linked the dream to fairytales that the boy would have known that created his perception of the wolf, in particular, the Grimm's fairytales of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Seven Little Goats.” He also explored the connection of the patient's wolf phobia to his relationship with his father (Gardiner 1991, 173–177). Muriel Gardiner compiled a book of Freud's description of the case, the patient's own writing, and those of a later analyst of the patient. She titled it The Wolf Man by the Wolf Man. Clearly, the ghost wolf has had a strong impact on psychoanalysis as well. My thanks to Sam Naifeh of San Francisco for calling my attention to this case of Freud's.

^8. Remember that the movie Dances with Wolves is the story of a soldier, Lieutenant John Dunbar, who has become overwhelmed with the carnage and atrocities of the Civil War and is reassigned to a remote frontier outpost in Indian country where he encounters a wolf who is curious about his activities. The local Native American tribe he befriends gives him the name Dances With Wolves because of the nature of his peaceful coexistence with the wolf.

^9. I refer the reader to his book and also to my review that appeared in Psychological Perspectives in a tandem review of Renee Askins’ book (Galipeau 2004).

^10. A brother of OR7, OR9, was not so fortunate. He headed east from Oregon into Idaho where he was shot illegally by a hunter; the hunter was pictured with the dead wolf on the Internet (http://earthfix.kuow.org/communities/article/oregon-wolf-or-9-killed-in-idaho/).

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).