Psychology & The Cross

Jakob Lusensky on the Hermitix podcast discussing the archetype of the puer aeternus, or eternal youth. 
Drawing on Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, they explore possibility and the difficulty of commitment, the relationship between youth and age, and the place of grief and imagination.

Originally published on Hermitix.

“I'm not a machine,” Jung insists in one of his last recorded interviews. What might his resistance tell us about our relationship to technology today?
An audio essay by Jakob Lusensky, featuring Jung’s original voice, on artificial intelligence, faith and the work of becoming psychologically mature.
 From the upcoming essay Living from the Centre, exploring Jung’s religious attitude in an age of AI.
Music licensed under creativecommons.org: Ketsa - From deep down

References

Amodei, D. (2026, January). The adolescence of technology: Confronting and overcoming the risks of powerful AI. https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
Jung, C. G. (1970). The undiscovered self (present and future). In Civilization in transition (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 10, paras. 488–588). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.
Nordenstreng, K. (1961, February). Interview with Carl Gustav Jung [Audio recording]. Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). https://sites.tuni.fi/kaarle/interview-with-carl-gustav-jung/

In this short reflection, I return to the final page of Jung’s Red Book, where he left a single handwritten word: Möglichkeit. Possibility.
What does it mean to continue dreaming Jung’s work onward, responding to the questions of our own present and future?
I also introduce the newly launched Center of the Cross, an emerging space for dialogue and new encounters between Jungian psychology and Christianity.
Read the original essay on Substack: Möglichkeit
Explore the Center: cross.center
Music licensed under creativecommons.org: Ketsa - From deep down

Leonard Cohen on songwriting, self-respect and getting up at 4:30. In this excerpt from his 1992 conversation with Paul Zollo, Cohen shares the patient work of finding a song, and the appetite to redeem the day so that it does not go down in debt.
First part of interview as audio.
Full text of interview.

Can psychology take religious experience seriously without reducing it to psychological explanations? Did Jung succeed in remaining a psychologist of religion, or did his psychology gradually become a theology of its own?
In this episode, I speak with Jungian scholar Matei Iagher, author of The Making and Unmaking of the Psychology of Religion, about the largely forgotten field of psychology of religion from which Jung's work emerged.
We explore what Jung inherited from this tradition and what he made distinctly his own: his attempt to hold together scientific psychology and religious experience, the relationship between his psychology and Christianity, and whether he discovered something universal in the world's religions or universalized his own experience.
Toward the end, our conversation returns to The Red Book and a provocative possibility: that we might need to move beyond the familiar language of archetypes and individuation and return to the more immediate language of Jung's original experience.
References and people mentioned

William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience
Théodore Flournoy
Rudolf Otto - The Idea of the Holy
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Max Müller
Mircea Eliade
James W. Heisig - Imago Dei: A Study in C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion
C. G. Jung - The Red Book
The music played in this episode is licensed under creativecommons.org: Ketsa - From deep down