On Gaslighting

Abramson, an associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University–Bloomington, debuts with an edifying exploration of the ubiquitous yet often misunderstood term, which originated in the 1944 film Gaslight and spread in therapeutic circles before entering the public lexicon in the 2010s. According to the author, gaslighting occurs when one person “induce[s] in another” the “sense that her reactions... qualify as ‘crazy,’” and “that she isn’t capable of forming apt beliefs.” Yet the term has been stretched to encompass such phenomena as dismissal, shaming, and betrayal, according to Abramson, and has been misapplied in such notions as “structural gaslighting,” which holds that social structures exert “crazy-making” effects on marginalized people. (Abramson disqualifies the phrase partly because gaslighting refers to interpersonal interactions, but acknowledges that the “prejudicial social tropes” upheld by these structures—that women are “hysterical and overly emotional,” for example—are often utilized as tools by gaslighters.) While Abramson’s prose can become convoluted (“it’s immediately clear how implausible it is to suppose that whatever makes gaslighting wrong, and whatever that wrongness consists in, it’s simply to be read off of ‘whatever the wrong-making feature of wrongful manipulation is’”), she makes salient points about the ways gaslighting traffics on trust, and ends on an uplifting note, encouraging readers to “be articulate and specific” when describing experiences for which they might otherwise be gaslit. Patient readers will be rewarded. (Mar.)