In her work entitled Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés examines myths, tales and legends of various cultural and ethnic backgrounds to elicit the wild woman archetype. Estés’s interpretations seem to depict the universalities of the female self appearing in different forms in many cultures. The following paper focuses on three essential elements of the female self, namely initiation, intuition and instincts as presented in three tales recounted in the book; that is the story of Bluebeard, the story of Vasilisa the Wise and the story of the Red Shoes. The aim of the article is to present Estés’s interpretations and her vision of the female self, to confront her readings with other existing analyses of the tales, as well as to show the value of Estés’s work not only for psychological studies but also for cultural and literary analyses.