Why do they call psychologists “shrinks”?

I’ve been asking this question to all of my clients and none of them gave me any answer, so I would like to share this horrifying story with you now. Because what we say does really matter, I’m telling this as both a psychologist and a linguist. My love for languages simply pushes me to explore all and everything, while the therapy works very well when I use the tool of verbal programming.

So, it all started in 1950, when Time magazine shared the Hollywood slang with the broad audience. The initial full word was “headshrinker” and there are 3 versions of why:

- Any profession starting with the word “psycho-” had then been and still is thought to be scary, mysterious and hostile in many parts of the world. I’ll tell you below why shrinking heads is a horror.

- Many well taught yet untalented psychologists stick to their very rigid schools and systems, shrinking all the human diversity into some types, categories and labels, to mere causes and symptoms rather than regarding them as complex individuals.

- What a good psychologist actually does is shrink a client’s narcissistic, inflated sense of self and all the excess importance of things to them, due to which exactly a person gets anxious.

Now the horror part, the true origin. Headshrinkers are special force warriors, the headhunters of the Amazonian tribe Javaro dwelling in Ecuador and Peru. In 1949, some prominent explorer went there and shot a documentary, which he brought back to Hollywood for editing and publishing. That’s how the world learned what it was and why Hollywood immediately adopted the word.

So these warriors would kill their enemies and cut their heads off. After that they’d take the skull out leaving only the skin and hair parts. The eyelids, nostrils and mouth would then be sewed up in a special voodoo manner to trap and keep the spirit of the enemy inside.

This is actually the main reason behind the whole thing — to own the souls of your enemies, absorb their power and courage, make their spirits serve you. And then they boiled this thing for some time, because of which it shrank 2–3 times in size.

After boiling, they put stones and earth inside those heads and “ironed” the wrinkled skin with hot flat stones. Now the head was small, handy and ready to be worn with others on a stick or a belt, guarding and serving the owner.

Now you know it and will never forget it, right? I’m personally very much OK and even proud to be called a shrink since I learned what was behind. So please feel free to call me like that if you still want to do so. Just don’t say anything bad like “I’ll be damned!” or “100 anchors up my ass!” — you might actually get exactly that from life.