On Gaslighting 

Roger Berkowitz

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.”