Why is a psychiatrist known as a "shrink"?

Question

...when and why did this term become a logical replacement for a therapist?

Answer 1

I did know that the term was short for 'head shrinker', but your question prompted me to look further.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-shr1.htm says that no one knows who invented the term but that it was a Hollywood term and became spread after being used in the film Rebel Without A Cause. It was related to the head-shrinkers, the Jivaro tribe of the Amazon, who took the skin from the skull and shrank it down to make a grisly trophy.

http://www.word-detective.com/030698.html says that at the time the word came into use, the newspapers were full of cartoons about head-shrinkers (the real ones) and so the use of the imagery might have come about just because the image of 'head shrinking' was topical and handy to apply to a science that messed with people's heads in a different way.
It says the word first came into print in first showed up in print in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" in 1966. However, the World Wide Words link I gave before says that it's earlier than that:

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The earliest example we have is from an article in Time in November 1950 to which an editor has helpfully added a footnote to say that head-shrinker was Hollywood jargon for a psychiatrist. The term afterwards became moderately popular, in part because it was used in the film Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Robert Heinlein felt his readers needed it to be explained when he introduced it into Time For The Stars in 1956: “‘Dr. Devereaux is the boss head-shrinker.’ I looked puzzled and Uncle Steve went on, ‘You don’t savvy? Psychiatrist.’” By the time it turns up in West Side Story on Broadway in 1957 it was becoming established.
***(end quote)

http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=149505 has many links on the question, and a discussion on when and why.

None of the sites I looked at were definite on why - it is all 'probably' this and that. The word definitely surfaced in Hollyword and is almost certainly related to the shrunken head makers, but exactly why, when and who is lost in the mists of time.

Answer 2

Why is a psychiatrist called a shrink? The term is a clipping of headshrinker, a US slang term that dates to 1950. It is based on a metaphor that evokes the image of a head-hunter who preserves shrunken heads. The idea is that a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst messes or screws with your head. From Time magazine 27 November 1950:

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 clipped form appears some 15-odd years later. From Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 The Crying of Lot:

It was Dr Hilarius, her shrink or psychotherapist.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

Answer 3

The crazier people get, the more important they think they are, and so they get full of themselves -- get a big head. The shrink punctures their bubble and makes them realize they're just like everyone else -- shrinks their head, in other words.

Answer 4

Just for fun- because they are supposed to help you shrink all of the problems inside your head! LOL

Answer 5

It started in the hippie days. It's because they secretly shrink your brain while you aren't looking. It makes you so stupid that you don't even remember your problems. They just say they help you because they want to get paid.

Answer 6

It's a shortened form of "Headshrinkers" in the early period of psychiatry it was viewed as "quack" medical practice in the same vein as witch doctors.

Answer 7

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Answer 8

They were compared to Witch Doctors, and Shamans who shrunk human heads.

Answer 9

I have no idea! that's strange though! i was just asking my parents this earlier!

Answer 10

"Ghost" has the real answer