"Soooo... I guess you're like, Jon's anima, then?" Karyn asked Jane, raising an eyebrow at her.
Jane seemed confused. "A what now?"
"An anima. It's a psychology thing, you ever heard of it?" When both sides of Jon shook their head, Karyn continued "Well, it's... a psychology thing, like I said. One of the early wackos in that field got the idea that all men have a female 'other self' in varying stages of repression and development, and similarly all women have a male half within them. A man's female side is an anima, and a women's male side is called an animus."
"Oh. Well, I'm definitely that!" Jane exclaimed. "I didn't know the word for it until now, but yeah, that sounds like me."
Her male half seemed less convinced. "'Early Wackos,' huh? You don't sound like you've put much stock in the theory."
Karyn shrugged. "It's an idea from one of Freud's first major followers. Uh... Jung was his name, something Jung. He had all sorts of kinda off-the-wall ideas about people as a collection of inner identities and archetypes, which in my humble opinion range from 'that seems about right' to 'Eeeeerrrrmmm....' It's Freudian stuff, man, you know how it is: barely counts as empirical science at best, and overtly spiritual nonscience at worst."
"I'm standing right here, Karyn," commented a somewhat disdainful Jane. "How's that for empirical scientific evidence, hm?"
"Well, things are different with the wishing stone, obviously," Karyn replied just a touch too defensively. "I'd say standards of scientific rigor went out the window about the same time all the other basic, fundamental laws of physics as we know them did."
Jane was about to retort something, but abruptly got a sort of primordial feeling that she shouldn't, and thus didn't. Jon had subconsciously stopped her.
"Yeah, well, as fun as it doesn't sound to be some psychotherapist's lab rat here, I think we have some more immediate and tangible problems than the state of psychology right now," Jon interrupted. "Am I hearing correctly that you have a better idea of just what's going on here, with all the anima stuff, Kare?"
"Oh, well, uh..." Karyn suddenly seemed a bit self-conscious. "Probably not a lot better. I just look at the popularized interesting-looking stuff, kinda casually, you know? I don't, like, study this stuff or anything."
"You did say something about repression and development, though, right?" Jane pressed, now seeming to fully share Jon's curiosity, and more. "What's that about?"
"Uhhhh..." Karyn brought a ponderous hand up to her chin and looked away, obviously trying to recall information she hadn't seen or thought about in a good long while. "Well, um, the uh, the 'wackos' thought a man's anima develops in stages, right? Especially as he get more, uh, in touch, with her, I think. The first guy said there were 4 stages, if I remember right, gave each stage a different name, names which... for the life of me I can't remember right now, honestly. Anyway on the low end the inner girl is, like, not much more than just a sex object, right, not really her own... thing, I guess, where on the high end she's a fully developed personality with her own character and spirit and all that. Jung kinda had in mind this, like, whole spiritual journey guys were supposed to go on to develop their anima, I think, which is... questionable, but whatever. Am I making sense? It's been a while, like I said!"
Jon and his anima both stared at Karyn, trying to digest for themselves just what her ramblings were supposed to mean. "So you're saying that, now that I'm free," Jane asked, "I'm going to, like transform or something, every so often? Jump to a new developmental stage, and become like a new person?"
"But also definitely still me?" Jon asked out of both their mouths.
Karyn shrugged. "I guess it's possible."
