THE RIDDLE OF THE CENTURY
It is my personal and professional experience that effective psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and the likes who use some form of psychotherapy expand rather than to contract their patient's consciousness.
Assuming this statement is factual why is it that such professionals are often referred to as shrinks?
I have researched this question for a long time and have found no satisfying answer.
Go to it fellow gatherers. Here is a chance to speculate to your heart's content.
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Comments: 17
By using the term "shrink" we are equating the mental health professional with the voodoo medicine man, implying that either the profession is un-scientific and therefore dubious or that it relies on magic to accomplish any results.
I have never wondered/worried about this word, somehow it just fits.
The slang term "shrink," applied to psychiatrists and psychotherapists and psychologists, is a shortened form of "headshrinker," a derogatory comparison of the profession to primitive tribes who ritually dry and shrink the heads of their slain enemies. The term "shrink" dates back at least to the early 1960's, and first showed up in print in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" in 1966.