Noun. A psychiatrist or psychotherapist. Lit. “plumber of souls.” While the Anglosphere dismissively uses “shrink” – short for “headshrinker” – as slang for mental health professionals, Austrians and Germans prefer to imply that the psyche is a convoluted tangle of pipes that can go awry in complex ways.
It follows that a Seelenklempner is a professional who plies his trade by diving deep into the murky miasma of human existence, unclogging childhood traumata, mending the burst sewer mains of the unconscious and providing routine bolt tightening on the superego.
Somewhat Freudian in its anal-retentive undertones, belittling mental well-being as a sort of blue-collar activity might be considered as unflattering as shrinking someone’s head; but it also emphasizes the job’s vital nature, as anyone who has ever had a broken toilet or failed boiler on the weekend can attest. In addition, both Klempner and Seelenklempner tend to charge generously for their services, making the analogy apt in perhaps more ways than one.
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