Gaslighting is more than lying. It has been a long time since I saw the movie on which the word is based, but the villain (Charles Boyer) engages in a systematic campaign to make his wife (Ingrid Bergman) question her own judgment and eventually her own sanity.
With the help of their housekeeper, Boyer engages in an escalating series of dirty tricks to make Bergman believe that she is losing her mind. It’s a steady stream of little things. She straightens a picture, leaves the room, and when she returns the picture is crooked again. He’s in the room (surprise!) and tells her the picture was crooked when he entered the room and she couldn’t have possibly straightened it. He straightens the picture for her and it stays straight.
He has the housekeeper help Bergman to bed and give her a sedative.
Bergman can’t find her purse, which she always puts in the bureau. She’s distraught and leaves the room to ask her husband if he has seen the purse. Of course not! Let’s check again. They go back to the bedroom and the purse is in the bureau.
Back to bed she goes with another sedative.
Boyer ostensibly goes to work at night. He leaves the house and she can hear his footsteps as he walks down the sidewalk. Shortly thereafter, the gaslight in her room flickers as the gas is being diverted elsewhere. She thinks it’s her imagination and she has learned that she can’t trust her judgment. This happens a number of times shortly after her husband leaves for “work” in the evening.
Of course, her husband isn’t working. Instead, he pretends to go to work, doubles back, quietly enters the house, and heads to the cavernous attic where all of her possessions are stored. He is looking for the source of her family’s wealth, which arrived with the family when they immigrated, but no one knows where it is or what it is. When he goes to the attic every night to search, he turns on the gaslight in the attic which is responsible for the flickering of the gaslight in the bedroom.
That’s the gist of it, albeit an oversimplification. I may have some details wrong, as I’m going on memory. It’s really an elaborate ruse, using trickery and illusion (and sedatives), to undermine a person’s ability to trust their own senses and judgment.
I saw the movie recently explicitly to try to understand what this new word meant. That’s a very good summary.
My conclusion was that most people who use the word gaslighting have not seen the movie.
It’s a shame. Gaslighting is a good, evocative word for an important concept. The word is literally losing its meaning and the world will be a poorer place without it. They’ll probably try to convince us that it never really meant what we thought it meant.
The OP should just go see the movie already.
That happens with a lot of concepts. I saw one guy complaining to a second guy about how a third guy had mansplained something to him.
Gaslighting is a specific concept: Manipulating someone by making them doubt their perceptions. But I’m worried it will be used for lying in general.
No sense complaining about the death of words. This is the way. I’m sad that ‘salty’ now means ‘jealous or resentful’ instead of ‘sailor-like, esp. of language’. The internet is a graveyard of expressive richness.
I’m more worried that it’ll be screeched when someone just challenges your opinions in a steadfast way. I can totally see how someone tangentially familiar with the concept could interpret it incorrectly and claim they’re being gaslit when in fact they’re just being challenged and having their sources’ credibility challenged without anyone trying to warp their perceptions.
Well, at least part of it is that we don’t really experience salty sailors as an element of our society all that much these days. So reserving “salty” exclusively for that will basically cause the term to die out for lack of use.
Words change, but the OP seems way ahead of the pack and maybe not even going in the same direction.
No. Gaslighting would be if the Trump voter said, “What scandals? Kids kept in cages, you say? I’ve never heard of that happening. A Google search turned up nothing. You must be mistaken about the idea that kids were kept in cages.”
A more nuanced questions: Is Trump gas lighting when he insists that, say, the description of the July 25 phone call given in the whistleblower’s report is completely different from the transcript he released?
Now, the fact is that the two accounts are virtually identical, and that is easily proven by reading them side by side. But here’s where it gets hazy. My contention is that when he makes that statement, Trump actually believes that it is true.* Therefore, it isn’t gaslighting.
[Mods: This is my first post in GD. If I got too personal/political, I apologize.]
*The guy who wrote The Art of the Deal said that what amazed him the most about Trump was his (Trump’s) ability to believe that whatever he happens to be thinking or saying at any given moment is absolutely true.
**
SPOILERS FOR A FILM MADE IN 1944:**
The irony of the title is that dimming the lights was the thing that made her the most crazy, but it was the one thing he wasn’t doing on purpose. “Gregory” was going up to the attic to search for Paula’s aunt’s jewels, and when he did, he turned on the gaslights there, which drew gas off the house lights, and caused them to dim. Paula (Ingrid Bergman, who won her 1st Oscar for this performance), doesn’t know whether or not she’s seeing things. She bests him in the end, though, with her really brilliant “Because I am mad” speech.
Here’s a scene not quite half through the movie.
The “brooch” is a piece of jewelry he gave her, then stole from her bag. The letter scene is in the movie (and we all see the letter). When Paula says the name “Sergius Bauer,” there’s dramatic music, and Boyer gets an “Oh f*ck!” look on his face. It turns out to be Gregory’s real name, and he’s wanted in several countries under that name, and is a notorious jewel thief. As Gregory, he seduced Paula, then convinced her to move back to the house where her aunt had been murdered (by guess who) when she was a little girl, because he always wanted to live in London, he said.
There’s no question what Gregory is doing, that’s not the mystery, it’s why he’s doing it, and of course, who killed Alice Alquist. And briefly, where the jewels are.
If the movie is any guide (and I guess it really isn’t) the important parts of “gaslighting,” are these: it’s planned; it’s to an end (as opposed to random cruelty by a sadist or sociopath); and it’s a long campaign, not a single remark.
People have been using the word “gaslight” to mean this for a long time. “Gaslight” as a verb, ie, “to gaslight someone,” or “gaslighting,” is new, but I remember when I was a kid people said things like “Doing a gaslight,” or “pulling a gaslight number.” I can personally vouch for that having been around since the mid-1970s, and I’m sure it’s older.
Just as comparison, the maid (played by 18-yr-old Angela Lansbury) is not really “in on it.” Gregory manipulates her into being complicit. He does it first by hiring someone whose not really appropriate for the job, and then by shamelessly flirting with her. My point is, it’s deceitful manipulation, but it is NOT gaslighting.
Mere deceitful manipulation for a short-term goal, just because you are a tool, or to cover up you own deceit or shortcomings, is what we used to call “playing head games.” But yeah, challenging someone’s opinion with facts is not playing head games, either. It’s having a discussion.
If public discourse has reached the point that any disagreement is an attack, we might as well stop talking altogether.
OK. Screwed up above, and missed the edit window. Put the bit about ME watching the film as a kid in the part I quoted.
I’d love for an admin to fix it, but no pressure, guys.
My contention is that such is impossible absent some sort of delusional psychosis. Trump knows how to appear like he thinks something is absolutely true, because it’s a tactic he learned.
The main contention I have with the gaslighting claim on that is whether or not there is anyone who actually believes him. Without that, it’s just at most an attempted gaslighting.
As for the OP’s question: here is a Psychology Today article on what Gaslighting is. Trump fits some of the criteria, but not others. People in debate fit none of them.
This original meaning (in the movie, in the article cited above, etc.) is predicated on there being a personal relationship between the parties involved. Obviously that’s not the situation with politicians, or pundits, or other participants in public discourse. A politician doesn’t have the kind of interpersonal influence over me to make me question my own reality.
That’s why it seems to me that the term is taking on a secondary meaning which is more rhetorical. The description in the Psychology Today article loosely describes how Trump gets his cult-like followers to accept his lies about objective reality, rather than to question their personal reality.
It seems to me that, like with the term “trolling”, which most of you are probably intimately familiar", gaslighting is shifting and expanding in meaning, and in a similar way. Both terms originally required intent and purpose, which are not usually known by the “recipient” with perfect certainty, so the perception of gaslighting or trolling becomes the dominant factor.
If someone is a ruthless liar it is hard to tell whether they in any specific instance is outright lying, believe their own lies or just don’t care, so you either have to almost never use “gaslighting” as a term, almost always preface it with “they seem to be”, “this could be an attempt at”, or expand the term.
Richard Pryor still has the best take.