Photograph of Sigmund Freud, c.1921. A bearded man in a suit looks at the camera while holding a cigar that is just a cigar.
5 November 2021
In North American slang, a shrink, short for headshrinker, is a psychiatrist. A headshrinker can also literally be a person who reduces the size of a human head, in particular a Jivaroan person of South America who engages in that practice. The two senses seem at odds, but they are related.
The verb to shrink comes to us from the Old English verb scrincan, meaning to wither or shrivel. The Jivaro people did not actually shrink heads, rather they removed the skin from the head, placed it around a ball-shaped object, and boiled and dried it so the skin reduced in size around the ball. The Jivaroan practice started as a religious ritual using the heads of enemies killed in warfare. But with contact with settler-colonists, it turned into a commercial practice, with the Jivaro engaging in murder, i.e., head-hunting, to acquire the heads for trade with settler-colonists. Manufacture of and commerce in “shrunken heads” is still going on, but in current practice, the so-called shrunken heads are made from animal skin.
The idea of indigenous people engaging in the selling of heads dates to at least the mid nineteenth century. Herman Melville describes the harpooner Queequeg as a head-hunter, although in Moby Dick Queequeg is a South Pacific Islander, the head in question is from New Zealand, and it is described as “embalmed” rather than shrunken. Melville uses a conversation between Ishmael and the landlord at the Spouter Inn to describe the market for heads in New Bedford:
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes, he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it here, the market’s overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
But head shrinker in reference to one who makes shrunken heads doesn’t appear for another seventy years. The earliest use I have found of head shrinker applied to the Jivaro is from an article in the 11 May 1919 Springfield Republican about Indigenous culture in Peru:
Is your head too large? You can have it reduced to the size you desire by taking it to the head shrinkers who dwell in Peru just east of the Urabamba canyon. The head shrinkers guarantee that they will reduce the head and face to the size of an ordinary orange, and that when the job is done your features will be easily recognizable by friends and relatives. Before the operation is performed, however, it is a necessary preliminary that the head be severed from the body. The head shrinkers as a business organization, it must be borne in mind, do not enjoy much of a reputation for honesty. In many cases, after the heads have been shrunk, they have not been delivered to the kin of their owners.
The application of headshrinker to psychiatry occurs in the mid twentieth century. The earliest use I know of is from Time magazine of 27 November 1950 about actor William Boyd, who played Hopalong Cassidy in early western films and later television:
During his early years in Hollywood, 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.* Boyd, an Ohio-born laborer's son, went to California in 1915 because he yearned for money, fame, pretty girls and fun. He was a husky, handsome, good-natured youth with wavy platinum hair, and he hoped the motion-picture business would provide all. It did. He married a Boston heiress, whom he met while toiling as the chauffeur of a for-hire car; when divorce ended the union a year and a half later, he had accumulated such a handsome wardrobe that Producer Cecil B. DeMille personally gave him a job —at $30 a week.
[...]
* Hollywood jargon for a psychiatrist.
Time labels it “Hollywood jargon,” but there is no particular reason to think this sense arose in or was unique to Hollywood.
This psychiatric sense of headshrinker seems to be rooted in early suspicions of psychiatry, how it was believed to be more quackery than science and that psychiatrists “messed with” people’s heads. Another early use, this one from the San Francisco Chronicle of 2 January 1952 compares psychiatrists to witch doctors, and hence to Indigenous practices. The context of the column is that of being “baffled” by the motives of a serial killer:
It is really a job for a witch doctor, it seems to me. Science editors are called upon to explain the hydrogen bomb and beheaded chickens who continue to walk around instead of becoming fricasse. This calls for a fair range of imagination rather than exact knowledge.
I am sure it will not surprise you that the Mirror science editor was not baffled at all. He just got on the pipe and telephoned Dr. Brunon B. Bielinski, who is described as a “well-known local specialist in mental diseases.” (This follows the rule of thumb for local mysteries, to wit: Reach for the nearest headshrinker.)
So, a South American Indigenous religious practice turned to commercial business by settler-coloinists was appropriated by North American slang and applied to a medical practice that people distrusted.
Sources:
Delaplane, Stanton. “San Francisco Postcard: Shoot the Works.” San Francisco Chronicle, 2 January 1952, 13. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. shrink, n.1.
“Indians Reduce Heads to Size of an Orange.” Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 11 May 1919, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Kiddies in the Old Corral.” Time, 56.22, 27 November 1950, 18–20.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick (1851). Norton Third Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2018, 28, 31, 32.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2013, modified September 2019, s.v. headshrinker, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. shrink, v., shrink, n., shrinker, n.
Image credit: Max Halberstadt, c. 1921. Public domain image.
