The Seba library treats Stick in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Harris, Russ).
the stick has to do with an objective orientation, an objective direction. Thus it extends one’s will power and one’s purposiveness to a greater, more objective goal, beyond
Von Franz argues that the stick across multiple cultural contexts — judicial, episcopal, royal — symbolizes a transpersonal, objective authority that anchors the ego in something beyond personal sympathy or will.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
If you lift the stick before you, you will become invisible. And when you hit the ball with the stick, the ball will roll before you and show you where you should go.
In the Danish fairy tale, the stick functions as an instrument of the Self, conferring invisibility and providing teleological guidance to the hero on his quest.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick.
Merleau-Ponty uses the blind man’s stick as the exemplary case of motor habit, demonstrating how embodied mastery dissolves the tool into a transparent extension of bodily schema and perceptual field.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
we do often try to motivate ourselves with big sticks. And that’s really what you’re doing, isn’t it? Being hard on yourself, beating yourself up.
Harris employs the carrot-and-stick metaphor therapeutically to reframe punitive self-criticism as an ineffective motivational strategy, contrasting it with values-based positive reinforcement in ACT.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
he made a fire and cut some sharp-pointed sticks with which to roast them. Some he roasted in this manner, while others he roasted by covering them with ashes.
In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, sharpened sticks serve as crude cooking implements, grounding the mythological figure in bodily appetite and comic materialism.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
the old men sang the legend of the ancestors of the Little Hawk totem group, who in the altjeringa, ‘dream time’ of the mythological age, introduced the art of circumcising with a stone knife instead of with a fire-stick.
Campbell notes the ritual displacement of the fire-stick by a stone knife in Australian initiation mythology, marking a threshold moment in the transformation of rite and its symbolic technology.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside