The Anima Mundi School is a center for learning, research and reclaiming of the deep feminine & connection to the Anima Mundi—the World Soul, supported by and grounded in the psychology of Carl G. Jung.
about us
Anima Mundi School is a place of learning, re-discovery and reclaiming of the deep feminine & our innate connection to the Anima Mundi—the World Soul. Our school is based on the works of Carl G. Jung, yet it is rooted in the ancient teachings of the sacred feminine, as experienced and recovered by women today. As the feminine path of individuation can be different than the masculine one, our center is a place for women to explore this unique path, with the contemporary tools of depth-psychology while being immersed in the mythic imagination.
Our long-term courses are held within the framework of our research center, and is open to all women and those who identify as female. This growing community of women is individually dedicated to uncovering their roots, place and creativity in the world while reconnecting in the attitude of service to the Anima Mundi. Collectively, we listen, witness and research classic mythology and new emerging stories and motifs that arise from the spirit of the depths in our work with the mythic imagination and its connection to the larger ecology of which we are part. In our practices and course-work, we try to impose and project as little as possible and distance ourselves from the colonial gaze of taking and extraction. Rather, we practice kinship through submersion in the imagination, ecology and mythology we engage and weave ourselves into a reciprocal relationship of listening and creative participation.
core team
Farânak Mirjalili || founder & teacher
Farânak Mirjalili a Jungian analytical therapist trained and based in The Netherlands. She is currently in her second round of analytical training at the NAAP (IAAP) and the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Her current work and research revolve around connecting individual psychology to collective patterns in mythology and how working with myths within a ritual group context can help both the individual as well as the objective psyche transform during the therapeutic process. She is passionate about the post-Jungian thought of helping free the psyche from the traditional therapy room and giving it back to the World Soul, while respecting the importance for a sealed therapeutic container.
She is also a research student at the University of Amsterdam where she is doing fieldwork research on the intersection of Jungian psycho-spiritual alchemy and laboratory alchemy—the title of her thesis is: “The Practice and Psychology of Alchemy: Differentiating and Embodying Body, Soul and Spirit.”
She is the founder of the Anima Mundi School where she works with a small collective of women from various fields that bring together depth-psychology, anthropology, ecology, the mythic imagination, and the creative arts.
Roots: Farânak is of Iranian heritage, with ancestry from the southern desert-city Yazd and the lush green lands of Gilan in northern Iran. Her mother-lineage is of the ancient Iranian Zoroastrians, the gabr people—better known in the West as magus.
Gauri Raje || storyteller & anthropologist
Gauri Raje, PhD is a storyteller and anthropologist working with adolescents and adults from multilingual, multicultural and disadvantaged backgrounds. She works with different genres: folk tales, fairy tales, epics and myths, mainly from non-European regions, and autobiographical storytelling. She tells stories in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, English and other Indian languages such as Gujarati and Marathi. She is especially interested in the concepts of witnessing in storytelling, translation, multilingualism and embodied nature of creating stories. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2018.
Roots: Gauri is of Indian heritage. Her mother’s ancestry is from the regions of Saurashtra and central Gujarat. Her father’s lineage is from a fishing, warrior & bardic traditions of the Dakhan (Deccan) region in India.
Laura Krusemark || artist & art-teacher
Laura Krusemark is a visionary artist who shares the beauty and mystery of both inner and outer worlds through her paintings and her love for the piano. She holds B.F.A in Fine Arts - Oil Painting and Piano Performance as well as a BA in Fashion Design.
Many of her current artworks focus on the female archetypes, symbols and emerging images of the feminine. Laura's creative life is influenced by her passion to work and be in close relationship to the land and the elemental world, something that she learned from an early age while growing up on a farm. She has been working and studying with the Anima Mundi School since 2019. Her work at the School includes a close collaboration with founding member Faranak Mirjalili in weaving together new images that constellate in the collective psyche during the School's research programs. This work is not public (yet) and is archived in the image-library of the School.
Roots: Laura is born and raised in Kansas, USA and her ancestry stretches back to old Germany (Prussia).
Catalina Scotti || artist
Catalina Scotti is a self-taught artist and graphic designer. Her work as a graphic designer has been focused on the digital world and in her paintings she works on topics related to the world of the unconscious and dreams. How images flourish creating imaginary worlds that connect her with the inner and outer world. She has been studying Jung's theories and the unconscious since 2017. She started studying with Anima Mundi School in 2021 and now she is a guest-artist in the course of Reclaiming the Mythical Feminine and the creation of the school’s archive of images and motifs emerging from the depths. She is currently applying to do a Bachelor of Art at the Royal Academy of the Art in the Netherlands.
Roots: Catalina was born and raised in Viña del Mar, Chile. Her paternal ancestors are from the North of Italy (Turin) and her maternal line is from Spain. From both lines Catalina has Mapuches indigenous roots from the central valley of Aconcagua Chile.
The Anima Mundi School is an independent educational organisation with a small number of people behind the scenes including senior Jungian Analysts and former students and contributors of the Anima Mundi School.
““We human beings tend to experience ourselves as something separate from the whole we call the universe. This is actually an optical delusion of our consciousness it’s like a prison for us , our task is to free ourselves from this prison by bringing our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty, this striving for such an achievement is a path to our liberation and the only true foundation of our inner peace and security.” ”
“To propose a psychology of Anima Mundi is to invite oneself to a relationship of intimacy with the Soul of the World and its objects. From this point of view, the psychic reality of the World’s Soul becomes available from the images. There is no way to separate our soul from the souls of others – and by “others” I mean people as well as everything that we can consider an environment. It is, thus no longer possible to work with the classical notion of individuation and its rhetoric of “my travel,” “my process,” “my journeys,” the blind frenetic pursuit of an inner Self, and to ignore the individuation of the Soul of the World and its objects. The care of the soul does not necessarily mean introversion or denying the reality of the world, its substance, and objects. There is no way to engage in soul-making if we keep ourselves attached exclusively to the Self, and exclude the world.”
— Marcus Quintaes on James Hillman’s Polemics in Archetypal Psychologies (Marlan, 2008)
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