How gaslighters try to drive their targets crazy
ON GASLIGHTING KATE ABRAMSON 232pp. Princeton University Press. £20 (US $24.95).
FOR A WORD derived from the title of a decades-old play, “gaslighting” has proved to be remarkably well suited to the present. The podcast Gaslit Nation was launched in 2018, Google Books’s Ngram viewer has clocked a surge in the word’s usage since 2015 and in 2022 MerriamWebster chose it as their Word of the Year. Indeed, a recent New Yorker article bewailed its ubiquity.
In a crisp new book, On Gaslighting, Kate Abramson sets out to get a clearer view of gaslighting, distinguishing it from related harms such as lying, brainwashing or infantilizing. For her the term’s increasing use in both popular and academic discourse should give one pause: broadening the concept “runs the real risk of what’s come to be called ‘semantic bleaching’”. By attending carefully to what is specific about gaslighting, Abramson hopes to help protect the power of the idea.
In order to illustrate the phenomenon she begins her book with a litany of exhortations that looks like a bingo card for edgelords and mansplainers: “That’s crazy”; “It didn’t happen like that”; “I was just joking!”; “You’re overreacting”; “Don’t get so worked up”. Each example in isolation doesn’t quite get at the iterative nature of gaslighting – which typically “involves multiple incidents that take place over long stretches of time”– but Abramson argues that, taken cumulatively, such statements radically undermine a target’s “independent standing as deliberator and moral agent”.
The author makes the case that a “gaslighter is both trying to make the target think that she is crazy and trying to actually drive her crazy”. This is what separates him (and research shows it is often a him) from the overeager tone police, a disingenuous factchecker or someone “just asking questions”. “The central desire or aim of the gaslighter, to put it sharply, is to destroy even the possibility of disagreement – to have his sense of the world not merely confirmed but placed beyond dispute.” The would-be gaslighter need not appeal to a victim’s reasons or emotions to do this; he could also insidiously appeal to their moral values or better angels (for instance, by chiding “You’re so suspicious”). While gaslighting can be carried out by “multiple parties”, the act is, Abramson stresses, “best understood as a form of interpersonal interaction rather than as a feature of social structures”.
Her dismissal of “structural gaslighting” will strike some readers as rash; it directly contradicts the claims of scholars who have advanced theories of collective gaslighting, including cultural gaslighting (as
