gaslighting, an elaborate and insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation, usually practiced by a single deceiver, or “gaslighter,” on a single victim over an extended period. Its effect is to gradually undermine the victims’ confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance, thereby rendering them pathologically dependent on the gaslighters in their thinking or feelings.
As part of the process, the victims’ self-esteem is severely damaged, and they become additionally dependent on the gaslighters for emotional support and validation. In some cases the intended (and achieved) result is to rob the victims of their sanity. The phenomenon is attested in the clinical literature as a form of narcissistic abuse whereby extreme narcissists attempt to satisfy their pathological need for constant affirmation and esteem (for “narcissistic supply”) by converting vulnerable people into intellectual and emotional slaves whom the narcissists paradoxically despise for their victimhood. Because gaslighters themselves are typically psychologically disordered, they are often not fully aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it.
The term gaslighting is derived from the title of a 1938 British stage play, Gas Light, which was subsequently produced as a film, Gaslight, in the United Kingdom (1940) and the United States (1944). Those dramas vividly, if somewhat simplistically, depicted some of the basic elements of the technique. These may include: attempting to convince the victims of the truth of something intuitively bizarre or outrageous by forcefully insisting on it or by marshaling superficial evidence; flatly denying that one has said or done something that one has obviously said or done; dismissing the victims’ contrary perceptions or feelings as invalid or pathological; questioning the knowledge and impugning the motives of persons who contradict the viewpoint of the gaslighter; gradually isolating the victims from independent sources of information and validation, including other people; and manipulating the physical environment to encourage the victims to doubt the veracity of their memories or perception. In the play and films, for example, a deceitful husband drives his wife to near insanity by convincing her that she is a kleptomaniac and that she has only imagined the sounds in the attic and the dimming of the gaslights in their house, which were actually the result of her husband’s searching for her aunt’s missing jewels. Although the gaslighter is a man and the victim a woman in the play and films, gaslighters and their victims can be persons of any gender.