For twenty years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and a practicing psychotherapist in the Boston area, Hogart has come to understand the doctor-patient relationship, and is intimately acquainted with the professional scene, where he has witnessed the internecine battles within the profession.
There are times when only humor, which is not part of psychiatric training or practice, can tell the truth. In Shrunk he shows us how the truth remains elusive even for those whose task it is to sort it out, and how easy it is with patients, no less than in the law, to get it wrong, and to commit offenses in the name of truth and virtue.
Encouraged to write by Herbert Read and Lionel Trilling, now, some years later, not wanting to be hasty, Hogart has taken on his own profession and written Shrunk.
