Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
The lexical and cultural background. For the nouns shrink and headshrinker.
From NOAD:
noun shrink: informal a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychotherapist: you should see a shrink. ORIGIN: … The noun (1960s) is shortened from headshrinker.From OED2 (1914, not yet revised)
noun shrink [AZ: a nouning of the verb shrink]: 1.a. An act of shrinking, flinching, cowering, etc. [1st cite 1590; representative ex., from a1728: A Shrink, or Contraction, in the Body]From NOAD:
noun headshrinker: 1 historical a headhunter who preserved and shrank the heads of their dead enemies. …From OED3 (revised 2013):
noun headshrinker / head-shrinker: colloquial (originally and chiefly U.S.). A person who treats mental health problems; a psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, etc. [the 1st cite, from Time in 1950, presupposes familiarity with the expression: Anyone who had predicted that he would end up as the rootin’-tootin’ idol of U.S. children would have been led instantly off to a headshrinker.]
The origin of psychotherapeutic headshrinker is unclear. There seem to be two speculations about its history:
(in the context of head-hunters in the news and in popular culture of the 1940s) from the practice of shrinking the head of a conquered enemy — used either seriously; or humorously, to lessen the sense of a therapist’s power
counteracting a swelled head ‘an exaggerated opinion of oneself” (Merriam-Webster online) by shrinking it
The first proposal looks more plausible, but to get beyond speculation it needs to be supported by textual evidence from the period, with attention to the cultural context of the citations. (As usual, I confess that I have neither the resources nor the detailed knowledge of the cultural context to undertake such a research project.)
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