Carl Jung: This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy.

Anonymous Dear Herr N., 2 November 1960

Although I don’t like analysing dreams by post,I will make an exception in your case as the dream is particularly clear The church stands for your religious situation.

The right is the conscious side, the left the unconscious.

You are therefore conscious of possessing a vessel that contains water and some kind of plant.

This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy.

The priest is the orthodox Catholic in you who interrupts this process of growth by emptying the water out on the left.

In other words, he puts the process back into the unconscious again because for understandable reasons he cannot approve of it.

In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids.

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608