We bandy about the phrase “gaslighting” a lot these days, maybe it’s time for a refresher on what it really means. Kate Abramson, associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what defines gaslighting, what motivates perpetrators, and why the idea intrigues us so. Her book is ‘On Gaslightning’.
Gaslighting is one of those experiences that can be difficult to grasp. If you find that’s true, try this: think about one of your worst experiences, an experience that either itself or in its effects dragged on for months. Now imagine that while you were going through that, the voices around you either flatly denied that anything worth being upset about was going on, radically minimised it or reconceptualised the experience so that it would not be so uncomfortable (for them) to live with.
You protested. The protestations were greeted with, ‘That’s crazy’, ‘It’s not a big deal’, ‘You’re overreacting.’ Somehow you endured. But the very fact of your survival then became woven into the rewriting of history, to confirm the minimising and denials and later repression. (‘Well, you survived, didn’t you?’, ‘It all worked out in the end’ or ‘That was just a blip.’) So, at no point during it did someone (or perhaps someone did, but not enough, or perhaps just not the people most dear to you) look at you and confirm the reality of the horror with which you were dealing. To the contrary, they said you’re crazy for being upset and over-sensitive, and any difficulty you might have was ‘all in you’. That’s what gaslighting is like.
Suffering on account of gaslighting is not a sign of fragility, weakness or an exceptionally damaged psyche, it’s a sign of being human. We all need interpersonal confirmation, especially in difficult situations. And when that confirmation is refused or deliberately thwarted in order to undermine radically someone’s ability to make claims and decisions and to protest bad conduct, it’s gaslighting.
It’s not a coincidence that the play (Gas Light, 1938) and movies (Gaslight, 1940 and 1944) that gave rise to this term involve interactions between spouses. In close adult relationships one is especially vulnerable to emotional manipulation. And there are reasons to think that those who engage in gaslighting may be more likely to do so in intimate contexts, not only because they can more readily do so but because it is more emotionally threatening for them to be challenged by an intimate partner. Most of us are more emotionally responsive to disagreements with loved ones than to disagreements with strangers. We react by feeling especially curious or sad, or perhaps anxious about negotiating potential practical conflicts or conflicts in values. The gaslighter reacts by trying to make the challenge go away by configuring its source as crazy.
It is important to consider the variety of ways these targets are characterised by their gaslighters — for example, too sensitive, paranoid, crazy or prude. Gaslighters often use love as a tool in gaslighting. Being in a loving relationship with someone plausibly gives us reason to give their views about what is in our interest a little extra credence. We needn’t go very far in this direction to see how this can become a gaslighting tool. Then, when a partner says, ‘You’re paranoid’, there is that moment to pause and second-guess oneself.
Loving someone also involves wanting to be with the beloved, and wanting the beloved to want to be with you. In this way, it’s built in to the structure of loving someone that their expressing a desire not to be around you is felt (absent further explanation) as a fracture, however small, in love. And that, too, gives the gaslighter a tool. Consider the way in which the phrase, ‘I’ll just give you some space,’ can function simultaneously as a dismissal (‘You’re so nuts I don’t want to hear you’) and a threat (‘continue this way and I will disappear’).
Loving someone involves wanting them to fare well. The evident distress on a gaslighter’s face as they say, for instance, ‘Oh, have some sympathy for the guy’, isn’t just about ‘the guy’: to the extent the gaslighter is distressed, and one wants people whom one loves not to be distressed, one will want to relieve his distress. We want our beloveds to think well of us. To say to someone who loves you, ‘You’re crazy’, is not only to condemn but also to thereby threaten one of the basic desires involved in loving.
In the aftermath of gaslighting, it’s common for targets to speak of having ‘lost the ability to trust’. That’s a quick way of encapsulating what we’ve seen is a much more complicated truth about this facet of the damage of gaslighting. Trusting well isn’t so much a power as it is a skill — a skill of affective regulation, interpersonal insight, and negotiation, of setting apt normative expectations and revising them where called for, of perception, of moral reflection. In this light, one way of capturing what gaslighting does to trust is to say that it annihilates the skill but leaves the power.
There is no way around the long road back to the skill of trusting. But there is a road back. It might not be the worst idea to take a little philosophy on the road with you too.
The Standard, May 20, 2024.
Gaslighting, Abramson writes, is best understood as a form of interpersonal interaction, a particular way of fundamentally undermining someone. The gaslighter, Abramson argues, aims to make his target experience herself as incapable of reasoning, perceiving, or reacting in ways that would allow her to form appropriate beliefs, perceptions, or emotions in the first place. He seeks not only to induce in her this unmoored sense of herself but also to make it a reality. Using examples and analysis, Abramson gives an account of gaslighting and its immorality, and argues that such a discussion can help us understand other aspects of social life—from racism and sexism to the structure of interpersonal trust.
Whilst Kate Abramson’s On Gaslighting is written primarily from a philosophical perspective, with Abramson herself being a philosophy professor, the content covered within her non-fiction book covers a broad range of other subject areas. This book has the potential to be of interest to film studies students as well as those who study sociology, media or psychology.
The reason why On Gaslighting might appeal to a range of academic disciplines is because Abramson’s extended essay provides a comprehensive guide to the phenomenon, rather than just an overview. For me, this is where her book particularly stands out amongst other philosophical offerings on the same topic. Abramson does not simply explain what gaslighting means, because anyone with an online presence within the past few years will have at least a vague comprehension of the phenomenon. Abramson goes beyond definition; particularly interesting for me (as a philosophy student) is how she builds on existing scholarship to suggest that the phenomenon is not predominantly an epistemic wrong (a wrong to do with knowledge) as suggested by her academic peers, but rather equally – if not more so – a moral wrong. Abramson claims that ‘…he [the perpetrator] gaslights…by so radically undermining another person that she has nowhere left to stand’ (p. 56). In this way, she informs readers that gaslighting does not just impact a victim’s sense of knowledge, but also isolates them from their peers and, ultimately, their sense of self.
Despite praising why On Gaslighting is of academic note, I would clarify that Abramson’s writing is not purely for the scholar. Whilst the author does use terms that those outside of certain disciplines may be unaware of, the tone of the book is instructive rather than imperious, with important phrases explained in detail using practical examples from reality. Indeed, Abramson is not stingy with her use of examples, resolving to show how gaslighting can affect multiple social minorities. An important message of the book is that, although the phenomenon is conducted between individuals (and so is interpersonal), it relies heavily upon larger systems of prejudice within society due to its dependency on power imbalances within relationships and its use of bigoted stereotypes. Abramson’s exposition highlights gaslighting as a form of abuse and manipulation by using a diverse range of examples to show how it can manifest itself within the mundane. Whilst gaslighting is particularly rife in cases of domestic abuse, it also occurs within the classroom through racist microaggressions towards students of colour.
Another reason to read On Gaslighting is the thought-provoking nature of its contents. Abramson breaks down the multiplicity of gaslighting, showing how it does not always occur explicitly. The typical perception of gaslighting comes in phrases such as ‘you’re overreacting’ or the more common ‘you’re crazy.’ Whilst these are still common within the vocabulary of the gaslighter, Abramson points out how gaslighting can work just as effectively by weaponising the target’s own sense of empathy and morality against them. This is just one of the ways in which Abramson attempts to widen the common perception of what gaslighting looks like within the public domain.
On Gaslighting is not for those seeking a light read, due to the heavy use of jargon required by the nature of Abramson’s book. However, this does not mean that her work should be considered purely of value for the academic. Indeed, one could approach this seminar as a guidebook on how to identify gaslighting in action, as well as how to protect oneself against those wishing to employ it by detailing the gaslighter’s motives and means of manipulation. Furthermore, Abramson’s employment of subsections and explanations through indices means that the book can easily be consumed in small chunks in order to make the content more digestible.
The term “gaslighting” is one of those words that comes out of nowhere and now seems to pop-up regularly. It was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2022 having seen a 1,740% increase in searches. As Leslie Jamison explains, “gaslighting” comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play “Gaslight,” which gained wide renown after George Cukor’s 1944 film adaptation of the same name. Gaslight portrays the “psychological trickery of a man, Gregory, who spends every night searching for a set of lost jewels in the attic of a town house he shares with his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman. (The jewels are her inheritance, and we come to understand that he has married her in order to steal them.)” Set 19th century London, the house is lit by gas lamps. When Gregory turns on the lamps in the attic, the lamps in the house flicker. Pamela wonders why this is happening and Gregory convinces her it is all in her imagination.
In
its pop-psychology usage, gaslighting refers to “Confident,
high-achieving women” who are “caught in demoralizing,
destructive, and bewildering relationships” that in each case
caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.” The most
obvious examples of gaslighting are when a parent denies their
child’s pain or refuses to accept that a child has been raped or
assaulted. Children are especially susceptible to being fully
manipulated, to be made to question and deny the way the world
appears to them. Children are easily gaslit because they are inclined
to believe their parents and other figures in authority. In such
cases, "gaslighting" is an act of grievous moral wrongdoing
which inflicts “a kind of existential silencing.” As Kate
Abramson argues, “Gaslighters aim to fundamentally undermine their
targets as deliberators and moral agents.”
Jamison
understands and appreciates the power of gaslighting to silence
victims, especially children. But she worries that the widespread use
and overuse of gaslighting that splits the world into clear
categories of victims and oppressors. If we have an argument, and I
try to convince you that the war in the Middle East was started by
Hamas, and you try to convince me that the war was started by Israel,
are we both gaslighting each other? What is the line between
gaslighting and seeking to persuade someone? The truth about
gaslighting, Jamison argues,
is more nuanced than is typically thought.
Gila Ashtor, a psychoanalyst and a professor at Columbia
University, told me she often sees patients experience a profound
sense of relief when it occurs to them that they may have been
gaslit. As she put it, “It’s like light at the end of the
tunnel.” But Ashtor worries that such relief may be deceptive, in
that it risks effacing the particular (often unconscious) reasons
they may have been drawn to the dynamic. Ashtor defines gaslighting
as “the voluntary relinquishing of one’s narrative to another
person,” and the word “voluntary” is crucial—that’s what
makes it a dynamic rather than just a unilateral act of violence. For
Ashtor, it’s not a question of blaming the victim but of examining
their susceptibility: what makes someone ready to accept another
person’s narrative of their own experience? What might they have
been seeking?
The issue of susceptibility gets thorny
quickly; it can appear to veer dangerously close to victim-blaming.
Ashtor doesn’t believe in the old psychoanalytic idea that
everything that happens to us is somehow desired, but she does think
that it’s worthwhile to investigate why people find themselves in
certain toxic dynamics. Without discounting the genuine suffering
involved, she finds it useful to ask what her patients were seeking.
Ashtor wondered aloud to me whether there could be something “good”
about gaslighting, and why it feels so transgressive even to suggest
that this might be the case. “There’s a real appeal in adopting
someone else’s view of the world and escaping our own,” she told
me. “There are very few acceptable outlets in our lives for this
hunger for difference.”
At the climax of Cukor’s film, Paula
confronts her husband with the truth of his manipulations. (He has
been tied to a chair by a helpful detective. She is brandishing a
knife.) He doubles down on his old tricks, trying to convince her
that she has misinterpreted the evidence and should cut him free. But
Paula turns his own game against him: “Are you suggesting that this
is a knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone mad, my husband?” In a
further twist, she inhabits the role of madwoman as a repurposed
costume:
How can a madwoman help her husband to escape? . . . If I were not mad, I could have helped you. . . . But because I am mad, I hate you. Because I am mad, I have betrayed you. And because I’m mad, I’m rejoicing in my heart, without a shred of pity, without a shred of regret, watching you go with glory in my heart!
On its surface, this final scene offers us a clear, happy
ending. The gaslit party triumphs and objective truth prevails. But
deeper down it gestures toward a more complex vision of gaslighting:
as a reciprocal exchange in which both parties take turns as gaslit
and gaslighter. This is a version of gaslighting that psychoanalysis
is more congenial to. In the Psychoanalytic Quarterly article from
1981, the authors describe a “gaslighting partnership” whose
participants may “oscillate” between roles: “Not infrequently,
each of the participants is convinced that he or she is the
victim.”
In this sense, gaslighting is both more and
less common than we think. Extreme cases undoubtedly occur, and
deserve recognition as such, but to understand the phenomenon
exclusively in light of these dire examples allows us to avoid the
more uncomfortable notion that something similar takes place in many
intimate relationships. One doesn’t have to dilute the definition
of gaslighting to recognize that it happens on many scales, from
extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace.
Ben Kafka told
me that he thinks one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that
people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a
tendency known as “splitting.” It strikes me that some version of
this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself—taking an
undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto
someone else, so that the self can remain “good”—but also in
the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world
into innocent and culpable parties. If the capacity to gaslight is
more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead
us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to
admit. Each of us has been the one making our way back into bed,
vulnerable and naked, and each of us has been the one saying, “Come
back into this bed I made for you.”
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
With her college boyfriend, the sex was rough from the beginning. There was lots of choking and hitting; he would toss her around the bed “like a rag doll,” she told me, and then assure her, “This is how everyone has sex.” Because Leah had absorbed an understanding of sex in which the woman was supposed to be largely passive, she told herself that her role was to be “strong enough” to endure everything that felt painful and scary. When she was with other people, she found herself explaining away bruises and other marks on her body as the results of accidents. Once, she said to her boyfriend, “I guess you like it rough,” and he said, “No, all women like it like this.” And she thought, “O.K., then I guess I don’t know shit about myself.”
Sometimes, when they were having sex, Leah would get a strong gut feeling that what was happening wasn’t right. In these moments, she would feel overwhelmed by a self-protective impulse that drove her out of bed, naked and crying, to shut herself in the bathroom. What she remembers most clearly is not the fleeing, however, but the return: walking back to bed, still naked, and embarrassed about having “made a scene.” When she got back, her boyfriend would tell her, “You have to get it together. Maybe you should see someone.”
A few months after they broke up—not because of the sex but for “stupid normal relationship reasons”—Leah found herself chatting with a girl who was sitting next to her in a science lecture. It emerged that this girl had gone to the same high school as her ex, and when Leah asked if she knew him the girl looked horrified. “That guy’s a psycho,” she said. Leah had never heard anyone speak about him like this. The girl said that, in high school, he’d had a reputation for sexual assault. Some of what she described sounded eerily familiar. “The idea that he would want to have power over a girl while she was asleep was as easy for me to believe as the idea that he needed air to breathe,” she said. “It reminded me of every sexual experience I had with him, where he had all of the power and I was only a vessel to accept it.”
Leah went back to her dorm room and lay in bed for almost two days straight. She kept revisiting memories from the relationship, understanding them in a new way. Evidently, what she’d understood as “normal” sex had been something more aggressive. And her ex’s attempts to convince her otherwise—implying that she was crazy for having any problem with it—were a kind of controlling behavior so fundamental that she did not have a name for it. Now, six years later, as a social worker at a university, she calls it “gaslighting.”
The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere? When I put out a call on X (formerly known as Twitter) for experiences of gaslighting, I immediately received a flood of responses, Leah’s among them. The stories offered proof of the term’s broad resonance, but they also suggested the ways in which it has effectively become an umbrella that shelters a wide variety of experiences under the same name. Webster’s dictionary defines the term as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.” Leah’s own experience of gaslighting offers a quintessential example—coercive, long-term, and carried out by an intimate partner—but as a clinician she has witnessed the rise of the phrase with both relief and skepticism. Her current job gives her the chance to offer college students the language and the knowledge that she didn’t have at their age. “I love consent education,” she told me. “I wish someone had told me it was O.K. to say no.” But she also sees the word “gaslighting” as being used so broadly that it has begun to lose its meaning. “It’s not just disagreement,” she said. It’s something much more invasive: the gaslighter “scoops out what you know to be true and replaces it with something else.”
The term “gaslighting” comes from the title of George Cukor’s film “Gaslight,” from 1944, a noirish drama that tracks the psychological trickery of a man, Gregory, who spends every night searching for a set of lost jewels in the attic of a town house he shares with his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman. (The jewels are her inheritance, and we come to understand that he has married her in order to steal them.) Based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same name, the film is set in London in the eighteen-eighties, which gives rise to its crucial dramatic trick: during his nighttime rummaging, Gregory turns on the gas lamps in the attic, causing all the other lamps in the house to flicker. But, when Paula wonders why they are flickering, he convinces her that she must have imagined it. Filmed in black-and-white, with interior shots full of shadows and exterior shots full of swirling London fog, the film offers a clever inversion of the primal trope of light as a symbol of knowledge. Here, light becomes an agent of confusion and deception, an emblem of Gregory’s manipulation.
Gregory gradually makes Paula doubt herself in every way imaginable. He convinces her that she has stolen his watch and hidden one of their paintings, and that she is too fragile and unwell to appear in public. When Paula reads a novel by the fire, she can’t even focus on the words; all she can hear is Gregory’s voice inside her head. The house in which she is now confined becomes a physical manifestation of the claustrophobia of gaslighting and the ways in which it can feel like being trapped inside another person’s narrative—dimly aware of a world outside but lacking any idea of how to reach it.
The first recorded use of “gaslight” as a verb is from 1961, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and its first mention in clinical literature came in the British medical journal The Lancet, in a 1969 article titled “The Gas-Light Phenomenon.” Written by two British doctors, the article summarizes the plot of the original play and then examines three real-life cases in which something similar occurred. Two of the cases feature devious wives, flipping the gender dynamic usually assumed today; in one, a woman tried to convince her husband that he was insane, so that he would be committed to a mental hospital and she could divorce him without penalty. The article is ultimately less concerned with gaslighting itself than with safeguards around admitting patients to mental hospitals. The actual psychology of gaslighting emerged as an object of study a decade later. The authors of a 1981 article in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly interpreted it as a version of a phenomenon known as “projective identification,” in which a person projects onto someone else some part of himself that he finds intolerable. Gaslighting involves a “special kind of ‘transfer,’ ” they write, in which the victimizer, “disavowing his or her own mental disturbance, tries to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy, and the victim more or less complies.”
On its way from niche clinical concept to ubiquitous cultural diagnosis, gaslighting has, of course, passed through the realm of pop psychology. In the 2007 book “The Gaslight Effect,” the psychotherapist Robin Stern mines the metaphor to the fullest, advising her readers to “Turn Up Your Gaslight Radar,” “Develop Your Own ‘Gaslight Barometer,’ ” and “Gasproof Your Life.” Stern anchors the phenomenon in a relationship pattern that she noticed during her twenty years of therapeutic work: “Confident, high-achieving women were being caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that in each case caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.” Stern offers a series of taxonomies for the stages (Disbelief, Defense, Depression) and the perpetrators (Glamour Gaslighters, Good-Guy Gaslighters, and Intimidators). She understands gaslighting as a dynamic that “plays on our worst fears, our most anxious thoughts, our deepest wishes to be understood, appreciated, and loved.”
In the past decade, philosophy has turned its gaze to the phenomenon, too. In 2014, Kate Abramson, a philosophy professor at the University of Indiana, published an essay called “Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting,” which she has now expanded into a rigorous and passionately argued book-length study, “On Gaslighting.” Early in the book, she describes giving talks and having conversations about gaslighting in the decade since publishing her original article: “I still remember the sense of revelation I had when first introduced to the notion of gaslighting. I’ve now seen that look of stunned discovery on a great many faces.”
The core of Abramson’s argument is that gaslighting is an act of grievous moral wrongdoing which inflicts “a kind of existential silencing.” “Agreement isn’t the endpoint of successful gaslighting,” she writes. “Gaslighters aim to fundamentally undermine their targets as deliberators and moral agents.” Abramson catalogues the ways in which gaslighters leverage their authority, cultivating isolation in the victim and leaning on social tropes (for example, the “hysterical woman”) to achieve their aims. Outlining the various forms of suffering that gaslighting causes, Abramson stresses the tautological bind in which it places the victim—“charging someone not simply with being wrong or mistaken, but being in no condition to judge whether she is wrong or mistaken.” Gaslighting essentially turns its targets against themselves, she writes, by harnessing “the very same capacities through which we create lives that have meaning to us as individuals,” such as the capacities to love, to trust, to empathize with others, and to recognize the fallibility of our perceptions and beliefs. This last point has always struck me as one of gaslighting’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is essentially an ethically productive form of humility, the awareness that one might be wrong, and turns it into a liability. Any argument in which two people remember the same thing in different ways can feel like a terrible game of chicken: the “winner” of the argument is the one less willing to doubt their own memories—arguably the more flawed moral position—whereas the one who swerves first looks weaker but is often driven by a more conscientious commitment to self-doubt.
Being a philosopher, Abramson spends a good deal of time defining the phenomenon by specifying what it isn’t. Gaslighting is not the same as brainwashing, for example, because it involves not simply convincing someone of something that isn’t true but, rather, convincing that person to distrust their own capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. It is also not the same as guilt-tripping, because someone can be aware of being guilt-tripped while still effectively being guilt-tripped. At the same time—and although Abramson recognizes that “concept creep” threatens to dilute the meaning and the utility of the term—her own examples of gaslighting sometimes grow uncomfortably expansive. (And her decision to use male pronouns for gaslighters and female pronouns for the gaslit also reinforces a reductive notion of its gender patterns.) Both the book and her original essay open with a list of more than a dozen “things gaslighters say,” ranging from “Don’t be so sensitive” to “If you’re going to be like this, I can’t talk to you” to “I’m worried; I think you’re not well.” It’s hard to imagine a person who hasn’t heard at least one of these. The quotations function as a kind of net, drawing readers into the force field of the book’s argument with an implicit suggestion: Perhaps this has happened to you.
Growing up in Bangladesh as the daughter of two literature professors, a woman I’ll call Adaya often had difficulty understanding what other people were saying. She felt stupid because it seemed so much harder for her to comprehend things others understood easily, but over time she began to suspect that her hearing was physically impaired. Her parents told her that she was just seeking attention, and when they finally took her to the family doctor he confirmed that her hearing was fine. She was just exaggerating, he said, as teen-age girls are prone to do.
Of all the people who approached me on X with testimonies of gaslighting, I found Adaya and her story particularly compelling because her diagnosis eventually offered her a kind of irrefutable confirmation—something the gaslit crave, but often never receive—that allowed her to confront the dynamic directly. For Adaya, the damage of her parents’ deception went beyond the hardships of her medical condition. “It made me feel that what I was experiencing in my body was not real,” she told me. “All my life I was told I was lying and exaggerating. . . . In those years when my sense of self was being formed, I was being given a deficient version of myself.” It was part of a broader pattern. From an early age, Adaya told me, she felt that she didn’t fit in with her family without quite knowing why. Eventually, she realized that this sense of falling short had arisen from things her mother said. She thought of herself as ugly because her mother said so, disparaging her dark skin; when she got a skin infection, she was made to believe it was because she didn’t keep herself clean enough. “If your mother cannot see the grace and beauty in you, who can?” Adaya said. That sense of shame and worthlessness propelled her toward an abusive marriage (“The first boy who told me I was worth loving, I moved toward him”) and kept her in it for years.
The idea of gaslighting first began to resonate with Adaya when she finally went to therapy, in her forties. She had gone in order to understand the dynamics of her failed marriage, but came to see that the problems went deeper. As she wrote in one of her first messages to me, she found it easier to talk about surviving domestic violence than about the emotional violence she experienced in her childhood. The things her mother had said about her “dislodged and disoriented and to some extent destroyed my sense of self.” Adaya has come to divide her life into three parts: her youth, when she believed in the version of herself shaped by her mother’s narrative; the period of adulthood when the hearing diagnosis caused her to wrestle with that narrative; and the current era, in which she has a stronger self-conception and is in a stable romantic relationship. She was able to arrive at this point in part because her therapist helped her identify her relationship with her parents as one of gaslighting. Looking back on herself when she was young, she says, “I almost feel like it’s a different person—like she is my child, and I want to take care of her.”
The psychoanalyst and historian Ben Kafka, who is working on a book about how other people drive us crazy, told me that he thinks our most familiar tropes about gaslighting are slightly misleading. He believes that, although romantic relationships dominate our cultural narratives of gaslighting, the parent-child dynamic is a far more useful frame. When I visited Kafka in the cozy Greenwich Village office where he sees his patients, he pointed out that, for one thing, the power imbalance between parents and their children is intrinsically conducive to this form of manipulation. Indeed, it often happens unwittingly: if a child receives her version of reality from her parents, then she may feel that she has to consent to it as a way to insure that she continues to be loved and cared for. (And what other sense of reality do we have at first, besides what our parents tell us to be true?) Additionally, gaslighting later in life almost always involves some degree of infantilization and regression, insofar as it creates an enforced dependence. Lastly, and crucially, Kafka’s orientation toward parent-child bonds stems from an essentially Freudian belief that the dynamics at play in our adult relationships can usually be traced back to those we grew familiar with in childhood.
There are many memoirs that recount experiences one might call gaslighting—indeed, the very act of writing personal narrative often involves an attempt to “reclaim” a story that’s already been told another way—but few trace the lasting residue of parental gaslighting as deftly as Lily Dunn’s “Sins of My Father.” When Dunn was six, her father left the family to join a cult who called themselves the sannyasins and preached a doctrine of radical emotional autonomy. At thirteen, Dunn went to spend the summer at her father’s villa, in Tuscany, where he lived with a much younger wife (they’d got together when he was thirty-seven and she was eighteen) and a rotating crew of fellow cult members. In the entrancing but unsettling paradise of the villa—with its marble floors and grand staircases, shoddy electricity, and plentiful vats of wine—one of her father’s middle-aged friends began trying to seduce her. After kissing her in the kitchen, his skin leathery and his breath stale from cigarette smoke, he whispered, “I want to have sex with you,” and invited her back to his camper van to listen to his poems.
When Dunn told her father how anxious these sexual advances made her, he replied that she shouldn’t be worried. “You could learn something,” he told her. “He’s a good man. He’ll be gentle.” (He changed his mind once he learned that his friend had gonorrhea.) For Dunn, her father’s failure to affirm her sense of being preyed upon was far more damaging than the other man’s predation. Years later, whenever she asked her father to acknowledge that his behaviors had affected her, he would gaslight her even more. Echoing the teachings of his sannyasin guru, he acted as if it were inappropriate for her to blame him for any emotional damage: “ ‘You can choose how you feel,’ he said, again and again. ‘It has nothing to do with me.’ ”
Sitting in Kafka’s office thinking of Dunn and Adaya, I found myself swelling with indignation on behalf of these gaslit children, taught to feel responsible for the pain their parents had caused them. But beneath that indignation lurked something else—a nagging anxiety coaxed into sharper visibility by the therapeutic aura of Kafka’s sleek analytic couch. I eventually told him that, as I worked on this piece, I had started to wonder about the ways I might be unintentionally gaslighting my daughter—telling her that she is “just fine” when she clearly isn’t, or giving her a hard time for making us late for school by demanding to wear a different pair of tights, when it is clearly my own fault for not starting our morning routine ten minutes earlier. In these interactions, I can see the distinct mechanisms of gaslighting at work, albeit in a much milder form: taking a difficult feeling—my latent sense of culpability whenever she is unhappy, or my guilt for running behind schedule—and placing it onto her. Part of me hoped that Kafka would disagree with me, but instead he started nodding vehemently. “Yes!” he said. “Within a two-block range of any elementary school, just before the bell rings, you can find countless parents gaslighting their children, off-loading their anxiety.”
We both laughed. In the moment, this jolt of recognition seemed incidental, a brief diversion into daily life as we crawled through the darker trenches of human manipulation. But, after I’d left Kafka’s office, it started to feel like a crucial acknowledgment: that gaslighting is neither as exotic nor as categorically distinct as we’d like to believe.
Gila Ashtor, a psychoanalyst and a professor at Columbia University, told me she often sees patients experience a profound sense of relief when it occurs to them that they may have been gaslit. As she put it, “It’s like light at the end of the tunnel.” But Ashtor worries that such relief may be deceptive, in that it risks effacing the particular (often unconscious) reasons they may have been drawn to the dynamic. Ashtor defines gaslighting as “the voluntary relinquishing of one’s narrative to another person,” and the word “voluntary” is crucial—that’s what makes it a dynamic rather than just a unilateral act of violence. For Ashtor, it’s not a question of blaming the victim but of examining their susceptibility: what makes someone ready to accept another person’s narrative of their own experience? What might they have been seeking?
The issue of susceptibility gets thorny quickly; it can appear to veer dangerously close to victim-blaming. Ashtor doesn’t believe in the old psychoanalytic idea that everything that happens to us is somehow desired, but she does think that it’s worthwhile to investigate why people find themselves in certain toxic dynamics. Without discounting the genuine suffering involved, she finds it useful to ask what her patients were seeking. Ashtor wondered aloud to me whether there could be something “good” about gaslighting, and why it feels so transgressive even to suggest that this might be the case. “There’s a real appeal in adopting someone else’s view of the world and escaping our own,” she told me. “There are very few acceptable outlets in our lives for this hunger for difference.”
Although most accounts of gaslighting focus on interpersonal dynamics, Pragya Agarwal, a behavioral scientist and a writer based between Ireland and the U.K., believes that it’s more useful to consider the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. “People who have less power because of their status in society, whether it be gender, race, class, and so on, are more susceptible to being gaslighted,” she told me. “Their inferior status is used as leverage to invalidate their experiences and testimonies.” She spoke of instances in medicine in which genuinely ill patients are repeatedly told that their symptoms are psychosomatic. Endometriosis, for example, is an underdiagnosed condition, she said, because women’s pain is often discounted. Similarly, in the workplace, minorities who report microaggressions may be told that they are being “too sensitive” or that the offending colleague “didn’t mean it like that.”
In this view of gaslighting, it becomes harder to see the utility of susceptibility as a framing concept. When I asked Agarwal about what role the gaslit party might play in the dynamic, she replied, “I don’t believe that it is the responsibility of the oppressed to create conditions where they wouldn’t be oppressed.”
What does the gaslighter want? In the 1944 film, the gaslighter’s motivation (to steal Paula’s jewels) is so cartoonishly superficial that it seems like a stand-in for something larger—a metaphor for the desire to undermine a woman’s self-confidence, perhaps, in order to keep her dependent. In real life, casting the gaslighter as a two-dimensional villain seems insufficient, another way of avoiding a reckoning with complicity and desire.
Kristin Dombek, in her 2014 book, “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism,” discusses how narcissism, once solely a clinical diagnosis, became an all-purpose buzzword. In her view, we hurl the accusation of pathological selfishness at others as a way of making sense of the feeling of being ignored or slighted. Gaslighting is not a clinical diagnosis, but, as with narcissism, less precise applications of the term can be a way to take an inevitable source of pain—the fact of disagreement, or the fact that we are not the center of other people’s lives—and turn it into an act of wrongdoing. This is not to say that narcissism or gaslighting don’t exist, but that, in seeing them everywhere, we risk not just diluting the concepts but also attributing natural human friction to the malevolence of others. Although “gaslighting” is a term that many members of Gen Z have grown up with, one teen-ager I know expresses its perils in this vein succinctly: “Every time someone gets criticized or called out, they just say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me,’ and it makes the other person the bad guy.”
It doesn’t help that the accusation is essentially unanswerable: “No, I’m not” is exactly what a gaslighter would say. Even a third party who disputes someone’s account of being gaslit is threatening to inflict the same harm as the gaslighter. No wonder the issue of proof is crucial in many accounts of gaslighting: the tights on the boat, the charts that show decades of hearing loss, the other women who were assaulted. These are empirical life preservers that pull us out of the epistemic whirlpool. In proving that our past perceptions were correct after all, they also seem to guarantee that we are correct now in our feeling of having been hurt.
Such certainty is possible only in retrospect, however. Inside the experience of gaslighting, Abramson writes, “the gaslit find themselves tossed between trust and distrust, unstably occupying a world between the two.” Which is to say, the more adamant you are that you’re being gaslit, the more probable it is that you’re not. On Reddit, a man laments, “My last GF loved to tell me I was ‘gaslighting’ her every time I simply had a different opinion than hers. Infuriating.” Has he been gaslit into thinking he’s a gaslighter?
Part of the tremendously broad traction of the concept, I suspect, has to do with the fact that gaslighting is adjacent to so many common relationship dynamics: not only disagreeing on a shared version of reality but feeling that you are in a contest over which version prevails. It would be nearly impossible to find someone who hasn’t experienced the pain and frustration—utterly ordinary, but often unbearable—that comes when your own sense of reality diverges from someone else’s. Because this gap can feel so maddening and wounding, it can be a relief to attribute it to villainy.
At the climax of Cukor’s film, Paula confronts her husband with the truth of his manipulations. (He has been tied to a chair by a helpful detective. She is brandishing a knife.) He doubles down on his old tricks, trying to convince her that she has misinterpreted the evidence and should cut him free. But Paula turns his own game against him: “Are you suggesting that this is a knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone mad, my husband?” In a further twist, she inhabits the role of madwoman as a repurposed costume:
"How can a madwoman help her husband to escape? . . . If I were not mad, I could have helped you. . . . But because I am mad, I hate you. Because I am mad, I have betrayed you. And because I’m mad, I’m rejoicing in my heart, without a shred of pity, without a shred of regret, watching you go with glory in my heart!"
In this sense, gaslighting is both more and less common than we think. Extreme cases undoubtedly occur, and deserve recognition as such, but to understand the phenomenon exclusively in light of these dire examples allows us to avoid the more uncomfortable notion that something similar takes place in many intimate relationships. One doesn’t have to dilute the definition of gaslighting to recognize that it happens on many scales, from extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace.
Ben Kafka told me that he thinks one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a tendency known as “splitting.” It strikes me that some version of this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself—taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto someone else, so that the self can remain “good”—but also in the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world into innocent and culpable parties. If the capacity to gaslight is more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to admit. Each of us has been the one making our way back into bed, vulnerable and naked, and each of us has been the one saying, Come back into this bed I made for you. ♦
So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit. What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis. By Leslie Jamison. The New Yorker, April 1, 2024.
“a fascinating, esoteric treatise on gaslighting, which includes not only what this psychological tactic involves, but what it doesn’t, on both the micro and macro levels.”
Kate Abramson, associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, has written a fascinating, esoteric treatise on gaslighting, which includes not only what this psychological tactic involves, but what it doesn’t, on both the micro and macro levels. The book was born out of Abramson’s passion to correct the frequent misuse of the term in current culture and distinguish it from other forms of emotional abuse. This is no traditional self-help book, but an academic, in-depth examination of its subject—though it may well be instructive for people who are being gaslit, wonder if others are being manipulated in this way, or want to understand what makes gaslighters seek to destroy others in this particularly underhanded, odious manner.
The take-away message of On Gaslighting is that it is like no other form of emotional abuse and should be viewed as such. The book begins with a list of common gaslighter admonitions, including, “Don’t be so sensitive, I didn’t say that never happened, don’t be paranoid, and you’re overreacting” used to advance their mission of driving someone crazy by eradicating their sense of agency and self-trust.
In short, gaslighting’s sole intent, by design, is not only to drive someone crazy but to ensure they also believe they are. Abramson shows us how gaslighting is “wrong, immoral, unethical, vicious,” and that “what makes gaslighting so awful is the multidimension nature of its immorality . . . how the gaslighter is both trying to make the target think that she’s crazy and trying to actually drive her crazy.”
Chapters include What is Gaslighting?, What Gaslighting Looks Like, Gaslighters and Their Aims, The Methods and Means of Gaslighting, Social Structures, Subjugation, and Gaslighting, The Multidimensional Moral Horror Show of Gaslighting, and Trust and Gaslighting, Revisited.
Abramson distinguishes between gaslighting and abusive tactics like shaming, manipulation, dismissing, guilt-tripping, lying, brainwashing, and emotional blackmail. She teaches us that gaslighting is never a one-off but always consists of a pattern of using the above strategies to undermine the sanity of its victim in intimate, work, and community settings. At work or in the community it is used to lower the status of a someone in their own mind and in that of their peers. In intimate relationships, its goal is to depower and unmoor the victim through manipulation until they become totally emotionally dependent on the gaslighter.
The author explains why gaslighters feel compelled to diminish and mentally demolish others. She describes how the gaslighter’s anxiety, insecurity about competence, and sense of powerlessness cause them to project these emotions onto others in order to gain a sense of mastery and power over them. There is also discussion of whether gaslighters’ behaviors are conscious or unconscious and how epistemic and testimonial injustice relate to gaslighting.
We also discover the characteristics of gaslighting victims—trauma sufferers and survivors who are insecure, emotionally needy, self-doubting and have low self-regard—which make them perfect targets for gaslighters. Readers might even wish the book delved more deeply into the traits and backgrounds of gaslighting victims, but that is not its focus.
The final chapter, however, explores how the absolute dissolution of trust in the gaslighter generates betrayal and grief in their victims due to a catastrophic loss of reality and sense of self. After having been gaslit, trust is difficult, if not impossible, to regain, and victims often find themselves experiencing knee-jerk fear of trusting others while also desperately yearning to have faith in them. Says Abramson, “There is no away around the long road back to the skill,” but being able to name one’s experience is an “incalculable” necessity in recovery.
On a macro level, although subjugation and gaslighting are done within social structures, Abramson argues it is not the structure itself that engages in evildoing, but the individuals in the structure; we therefore should not use the term structural gaslighting. Racial, ethnic, and sex stereotypes can be used to abet gaslighting as a way to depower targeted groups of people and cause them to question their own competence as can pressuring them to suppress anger and placing them in double binds so they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t (for example, being told to be more/less approachable, assertive or autonomous).
Because the author often debates arguments previously made about gaslighting by others in the fields of psychology or philosophy, the book at times feels as if she is speaking to them and not to a wider audience, such as when she states, “There are three claims some have made about the epistemic wrongs of gaslighting that are to my mind importantly misguided.” While disputing what other academics in the field have said is necessary in order to clarify the nuances and uniqueness of gaslighting, such challenges make the book feel more theoretical than practical.
There are also instances of repetition, as when Abramson states and restates the gaslighter’s targeted intention to drive a victim crazy and annihilate their sense of self. Tighter editing of the book would have made it more readable. Also, it would have benefited from more examples than her use of the films Gaslight and Pat and Mike, excerpts from writings of Simone de Beauvoir about her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, dialogue from the New Girl sitcom, and Dolly Parton’s lyrics from the song “9to5.”
Yet if someone wants to fully comprehend the underlying motivations, manifestations and implications of gaslighting vis à vis other forms of emotional abuse, this would be an excellent book to turn to.
Don’t be so sensitive.
You’re overreacting.
You’re imagining things.
These are things gaslighters say, writes Kate Abramson.
As she explains in “On Gaslighting,” the term originated in the 1944 film “Gaslight,” and after entering the therapeutic lexicon of the 1980s, steadily made its way into colloquial usage.
As a society we have become adept at classifying actions within interpersonal relationships using therapy-speak. From “attachment style” to “trauma-bonding,” personal judgments have become diagnoses — without the assistance of a licensed professional: Anyone with a social media account or a jokey T-shirt can get in on the action. (In 2021, the flippant phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” became a popular, snide social-media shorthand for a certain kind of capitalist feminism.)
Abramson posits that we are in danger of lumping together all kinds of interactions — lying, guilt-tripping, manipulation. These are all without question bad behaviors, but they are not necessarily gaslighting. Be precise about “gaslighting,” urges Abramson. Delineate it as distinctly as possible. Abramson, an associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, shines her spotlight on what gaslighting is, and isn’t. It’s no easy task. Gaslighting is “a multidimensional moral horror show” with numerous facets and nuances, she writes, and therefore not readily reduced to a bite-size, digestible definition.
She uses the first chapter to examine the origins of the term, starting with the classic film, in which a husband, Gregory, attempts to psychologically destabilize his wife, Paula. Gregory (played by Charles Boyer) wants to have Paula (Ingrid Bergman) sent to a mental hospital so that he can obtain her jewels. Over time, he implements various strategies: Taking a brooch from her purse and questioning her memory of ever having put it there. Hiding a watch, accusing her of stealing it, and then “finding” it, in front of friends. And each time Gregory searches for Paula’s jewels, he turns on the attic lights, causing lamps elsewhere in the house to dim. When Paula mentions the phenomenon, Gregory denies it — tells Paula it’s proof she’s losing her mind.
Though Abramson cautions against attempts to simplify the complexity of gaslighting, the basics come down to this: The gaslighter is “both trying to make her target think that she’s crazy and actually trying to drive her crazy.”
A haunting quote from Simone de Beauvoir is repeated throughout the text. Beauvoir is describing a discussion with her romantic partner Jean-Paul Sartre, during which he not only disagreed with her point of view but “ripped it to shreds,” leaving her believing that her opinions were worthless. “I’m no longer sure what I think,” she writes, “or even if I think at all.”
Yes, writes Abramson, gaslighters weaponize love and trust to inflict psychological damage. But gaslighters are not often aware that they are gaslighting. Gaslighting takes place over time. Gaslighting often involves intimate relationships — spouses are the blueprint, but “it’s depressingly common among abusive parents as well,” she writes, “both as a form of abuse and as a way of covering up other forms of abuse (by gaslighting those who protest against it).”
Gaslighting can be deployed in the workplace and in scenarios in which the target belongs to a marginalized group. Gaslighting “is a fiendishly brilliant tool for reinforcing racism, sexism and other forms of systematic subjugation,” she explains. Consider a boss who minimizes an incident of harassment or discrimination. Yet Abramson is adamant in pushing back against the idea of “structural gaslighting.”
While social structure can certainly be a tool in a gaslighter’s arsenal, she writes, it is “a fundamentally very different phenomenon from the features of oppressive social structures.” Prejudice can be harmful without an individual taking any specific action for the harm to occur, she explains, “let alone engage in the kinds of grotesque manipulations over extended periods of time that are characteristic means of gaslighting.” And so we learn that, according to these rules, social structures don’t gaslight — people do.
Like its spiritual forebear, Harry G. Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit,” Abramson’s close examination of a phenomenon is a helpful and enlightening, if dense and academic, effort. It’s made slightly more accessible by her inclusion of pop culture references (stills from the Hepburn-Tracy film “Pat and Mike”; dialogue from the sitcom “New Girl”; Dolly Parton lyrics) and real-life anecdotes about microaggressions at work or hostility on social media.
Yet after absorbing the gruesome particulars of gaslighting, a reader may not be much heartened by the book’s brief final section, in which Abramson addresses regaining trust after experiencing gaslighting.
She notes that “the appropriate companions in the difficult work of traversing that road are therapists and friends, not philosophers.” Still, she writes, being articulate about the nature of an experience is significant to working through it, and gaslighting is no different. “In that light,” she writes, “it might not be the worst idea to take a little philosophy on the road with you too.”
M-W’s popular dictionary defines gaslighting as:
Yet, as we know, dictionary definitions are of limited value in settling the meaning of complicated or controversial concepts. Gaslighting is one such concept, and philosophers have been working on developing accounts of gaslighting that capture the appropriate phenomena and help us understand it. For those interested in exploring the concept further, below is a selection of some philosophical work on gaslighting. Readers are encouraged to supplement this list with other scholarly materials (and links to them) in the comments.
“Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting” by Kate Abramson (2014, Philosophical Perspectives)
…The phenomenon that’s come to be picked out with that term [gaslighting] is a form of emotional manipulation in which the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds—paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy. Gaslighting is, even at this level, quite unlike merely dismissing someone, for dismissal simply fails to take another seriously as an interlocutor, whereas gaslighting is aimed at getting another not to take herself seriously as an interlocutor. It almost always involves multiple incidents that take place over long stretches of time; it frequently involves multiple parties playing the role of gaslighter, or cooperating with a gaslighter; it frequently involves isolating the target in various ways. And there are characteristic things gaslighters say: indeed it is remarkable how much overlap there is between phrases that Gregory uses in the movie, and the sorts of proclamations that are made by gaslighters to their targets in real life. I want to propose an account of what’s wrong with this way of interacting with someone. To do so, we’ll need to begin with an account of the structure of interactions that fit the initial rough characterization just offered. Any such account of the structure of gaslighting interactions will involve some regimentation of the term—after all, what we have here is a colloquial and therapeutic term that is picking out a recognizable phenomenon in human interactions, and the more precision we give to what we’re talking about when we talk about the kind of ‘crazy making’ manipulation that’s at issue in gaslighting, the more we set parameters for what qualifies as central and peripheral cases thereof. My hope is to give an illuminating account of the structure of gaslighting interactions that nevertheless preserves as its core that which has made it possible for “gaslighting” to become a colloquial term identifying a recognizable phenomenon. On the other hand, given that my aim is ultimately to give an account of what’s wrong with gaslighting, only some aspects of gaslighting interactions will be pertinent here.
“Allies Behaving badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice” by Veronica Ivy (formerly Rachel McKinnon) (2017, Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice)
This chapter focuses on the bad epistemic behaviors of “allies”, approached from a trans* perspective. One common form of bad behavior is that when “allies” are confronted with their bad behavior, they use their identity as an “ally” as a defense; other times, people will do so on an ‘”ally’s” behalf’: “Dave couldn’t have behaved that badly, he’s an ally!” The chapter describes gaslighting as an instance of epistemic injustice – more specifically, as an instance of testimonial injustice. In many cases, “allies”, when listening to a person’s testimony, privilege their own first-hand experience over the testimony of the person they’re supposed to be supporting. Probably, the “ally” suspects that the affected person isn’t properly epistemically situated – perhaps they’re not suitably objective – to properly assess the situation. Maybe the “ally” thinks the person is expecting to see harassment, so they perceive harassment when it’s not really there.
“Epistemic Dimensions of Gaslighting: Peer-Disagreement, Self-Trust, and Epistemic Injustice” by Andrew Spear (2019, Inquiry)
Miranda Fricker has
characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which
someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007,
Epistemic injustice: Power & the ethics of knowing. Oxford:
Oxford University
Press, 20). Gaslighting, where one
agent seeks to gain control over another by undermining the other’s
conception of herself as an independent locus of judgment and
deliberation, would thus seem to be a paradigm example. Yet, in the
most thorough analysis of gaslighting to date (Abramson, K. 2014.
“Turning up the lights on gaslighting.” Philosophical
Perspectives 28, Ethics: 1–30), the idea that gaslighting has
crucial epistemic dimensions is rather roundly rejected on grounds
that gaslighting works by means of a strategy of assertion and
manipulation that is not properly understood in epistemic terms. I
argue that Abramson’s focus on the gaslighter and on the moral
wrongness of his actions leads her to downplay ways in which
gaslighters nevertheless deploy genuinely epistemic strategies, and
to devote less attention to the standpoint and reasoning processes of
the victim, for whom the experience of gaslighting has substantial
and essential epistemic features. Taking these features into account
reveals that all gaslighting has epistemic dimensions and helps to
clarify what resistance to gaslighting might look like.
“Gaslighting, Misogyny, and Psychological Oppression” by Cynthia Stark (2019, The Monist)
This paper develops a notion of manipulative gaslighting, which is designed to capture something not captured by epistemic gaslighting, namely the intent to undermine women by denying their testimony about harms done to them by men. Manipulative gaslighting, I propose, consists in getting someone to doubt her testimony by challenging its credibility using two tactics: “sidestepping” (dodging evidence that supports her testimony) and “displacing” (attributing to her cognitive or characterological defects). I explain how manipulative gaslighting is distinct from (mere) reasonable disagreement, with which it is sometimes confused. I also argue for three further claims: that manipulative gaslighting is a method of enacting misogyny, that it is often a collective phenomenon, and, as collective, qualifies as a mode of psychological oppression.
“Gaslighting by Crowd” by Karen Adkins (2019, Social Philosophy Today)
Most psychological literature on gaslighting focuses on it as a dyadic phenomenon occurring primarily in marriage and family relationships. In my analysis, I will extend recent fruitful philosophical engagement with gaslighting (Abramson, “Turning up the Lights on Gaslighting” [2014]; McKinnon, “Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice” [2017]; Ruiz, “Spectral Phenomenologies” [2014]) by arguing that gaslighting, particularly gaslighting that occurs in more public spaces like the workplace, relies upon external reinforcement for its success. I will ground this study in an analysis of the film Gaslight, for which the phenomenon is named, and in the course of the analysis will focus on a paradox of this kind of gaslighting: it wreaks significant epistemic and moral damages largely through small, often invisible actions that have power through their accumulation and reinforcement.
“Gaslighting, First- and Second-Order” by Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky (2020, Hypatia)
In what sense do people doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first-order and second-order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities without doubting the accuracy of their concepts. The latter occurs when there is disagreement over which concept should be used in a context, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities in virtue of doubting the accuracy of their concepts. Many cases of second-order gaslighting are unintentional: its occurrence often depends on contingent environmental facts. I end the article by focusing on the distinctive epistemic injustices of second-order gaslighting: (1) metalinguistic deprivation, (2) conceptual obscuration, and (3) perspectival subversion. I show how each reliably has sequelae in terms of psychological and practical control.
“Dilemmatic Gaslighting” by Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (2022, Philosophical Studies)
Existing work on gaslighting ties it constitutively to facts about the intentions or prejudices of the gaslighter and/or his victim’s prior experience of epistemic injustice. I argue that the concept of gaslighting is more broadly applicable than has been appreciated: what is distinctive about gaslighting, on my account, is simply that a gaslighter confronts his victim with a certain kind of choice between rejecting his testimony and doubting her own basic epistemic competence in some domain. I thus hold that gaslighting is a purely epistemic phenomenon—not requiring any particular set of intentions or prejudices on the part of the gaslighter—and also that it can occur even in the absence of any prior experience of epistemic injustice. Appreciating the dilemmatic character of gaslighting allows us to understand its connection with a characteristic sort of epistemic harm, makes it easier to apply the concept of gaslighting in practice, and raises the possibility that we might discover its structure and the associated harm in surprising places.
“Emotional Gaslighting and Affective Empathy” by Katharina Anna Sodoma (2022, International Journal of Philosophical Studies)
Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that undermines a target’s confidence in their own cognitive faculties. Different forms of gaslighting can be distinguished according to whether they undermine a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions, perceptions, memory, or reasoning abilities. I focus on ‘emotional gaslighting’, which undermines a target’s confidence in their emotional reactions and corresponding evaluative judgments. While emotional gaslighting rarely occurs in isolation, it is often an important part of an overall gaslighting strategy. This is because emotions can help us to understand the evaluative aspects of our situation and thus put us in a position to protest wrongs, which is a context in which gaslighting frequently occurs. I argue that affective empathy constitutes an important antidote to emotional gaslighting. Affective empathy can lead to endorsement of a target’s emotional reaction as appropriate to their situation and agreement with the corresponding evaluative judgment. When it leads to endorsement, affective empathy can counteract the effects of emotional gaslighting because it reassures a target in their ability to make evaluative judgments based on their emotional reactions. Because of its opposing effects, affective empathy with the victim thus constitutes an important intervention to emotional gaslighting on the part of third parties.
There is also a collection of articles on gaslighting and epistemic injustice in Hypatia, volume 35, number 4 (2020).
Your suggested additions to the list are welcome.
(Edited to add: The idea here is to showcase academic philosophical work related to gaslighting; please limit your suggestions to such materials. Thanks!)
Philosophical Work on “Gaslighting” — Merriam-Webster’s 2022 Word of the Year. By Justin Weinberg. Daily Nous, November 28, 2022.
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