Gaslighting - The revival of a useful term
Reality distortion and “Knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel” (Bowlby, 1988).
During the past four years, or so there has been a revival of the use of the term "Gaslighting" and its modern interpretation which I have found to be mostly helpful in the clinical setting.
Originally written as a play (Gas Light, Hamiltion, 1935), this film noir Gaslight, (1941) was set in Edwardian times in England and tells the story of Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) who finds the body of her murdered wealthy aunt, by whom she was adopted as an infant, in the house where they lived together (9 Thornton Square). The police fail to find the murderer. Looking fragile and confused, the bereft and traumatised Paula is then sent to Italy to study music while being told that she must forget all that had happened. In Italy, she gets courted by her piano teacher, Gregory Anton. The vulnerable Paula falls in love with him, they get married and the couple eventually returns to her aunt’s abandoned house in Thornton Square. Once settled in, Paula finds a letter, she shows it to Gregory, who clearly looks agitated by its contents, since he has a lot to hide. He then slowly begins to torment Paula psychologically in various subtle ways such as dimming the gas lights in her bedroom; hiding objects; and then returning them to their place, whilst telling her continuously that she is not looking well and should lie in bed. Having clearly been left vulnerable by her traumatic early life, the confused Paula begins to doubt her own reality and her health gradually deteriorates. The rest of the film is a bit of a clunky thriller with a happy ending, such as when the tables are turned, and Paula says to Anton "It isn't here, you must have put it there. Are you suggesting that this is a knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone mad, my husband?". Despite this, it’s a classic and its strength lies in it being psychologically accurate storytelling way ahead of its time.
The term “gaslighting”, which is used to describe emotional abuse as a way of controlling and denying the victim’s sense of reality to the point that it becomes distorted. Gas-lighting happens not only domestically but culturally and interpersonally, we can see this in politics and the media. For example, at the Wellcome Collection museum in London, there has been an exhibition about the unconscious: States Of Mind; Tracing The Edges of Consciousness. As well as some very powerful and informative exhibits, the exhibition’s main message concerns the question: “is memory always a reliable tool?” We can sometimes be fooled by “false memories”, as our brains fill in gaps using information and experience of the world, or are deceived by suggestive images. A.R. Hopwood explores our surprising vulnerability to this in his “False Memory Archive". This form of distortive propaganda is meant to control the masses’ notion about the credibility of memory and we are all familiar with what follows that. (quoted from the exhibition brochure, Wellcome Collection, 2016)
Traditionally one might also equate the term gas-lighting with men who try to possess and control women. Mental health has improved greatly, yet we still hear of cases where the power dynamics between men and women remain corrupted. Unlike the happy ending of the film, some severely gaslit women do end up being sectioned in mental institutions after their husbands successfully convinced the authorities that their wives were crazy. The association between women’s behaviour and being labelled crazy has a long and infamous history in many cultures. The word hysteria, defined as behaviour exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable
emotions
of fear and panic, has been regularly associated with women. Until the early twentieth century – when the medical field was mostly ruled by men - female hysteria was the official medical diagnosis for a truly massive array of symptoms in women (including, but not limited to, the loss of appetite, nervousness, irritability, fluid retention, emotional excitability, outbursts of negativity, excessive sexual desire and a tendency to cause trouble). It is so pernicious, even as we creep towards equality, that many women don’t even recognise that they are powerless victims. Calling hysteria a “medical issue” meant that men didn’t have to respond to behaviour that challenged male belief structures. Instead, labelling women as hysterical made it easier to diminish women’s concerns and maintain men’s control.
Still, the gas-lighting phenomenon is not exclusive to women. Fundamentally it is one’s belief that it is okay to possess and own another and by doing so overwrite their reality to the point of the annihilation of another person’s selfhood, In Liotti’s words:
“If for instance, the care-taker consistently refuses to listen to the child’s statements about his/her emotional experience, or forces the child to accept interpretations of its meaning and cause that radically to diverge from his/her first-hand experience, a dissociation will ensue in the child’s memory. The episodic memories of the emotional experience the child is not allowed to talk about will not be associated with the explicit semantic structures developed through communication with caregivers. In this case, the early emotional schemata will be segregated in those domains of episodic memory that cannot easily be associated with the verbalizable aspect of self-knowledge.” (Liotti, p.219).
One of my clients, who was born into a family of organised ritual abusers, has experienced gas-lighting by her mother for most of her life and has clear memories where her mother day after day, repeatedly told her: “Darling, you were always quite dramatic,” “you never had much stamina” and constant comments about having tonsillitis, constipation, too many antibiotics, glandular fever, and then when she collapsed at twenty-four with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), her mother would visit her in hospital and assert that it was the Lariam (antimalarial tablets) that caused it. For this client, recognising the term “gaslighting” has not only helped her get closer to her EPS (dissociated emotional parts), but also enabled her to lift the veil of secrecy around her mother’s involvement in the abuse and develop a coherent narrative which is slowly helping her come to terms with the profound losses in her life.
More recently, since Brexit and the 2016 American presidential election results, we find ourselves at the midst of going through a massive paradigm shift and the new terms such as : “Post-truth” and “Post-facts” “fake-news“. describe a world that contains a lot of information without much in the way of supportive facts. The internet, has changed it all; like Narcissus staring at his own image in a pool, we have become accustomed to spending a lot of our time in front of the screen, situating ourselves at the comfort of our echo-chambers where we end up reading mostly posts of like-minded people from around the globe, hence hearing our point of view repeating itself in endless variations. By rapidly becoming two or more giant hive minds, we may be at risk of doubting our own judgment and gas-lighting ourselves.
Truth has often been associated with feelings, while facts are associated with evidence. In his efforts to distinguish between facts and truth, John Bowlby’s pursuit of the truth was always based on real-life events and facts. His observations of juvenile boys and young children separated from their parents while in hospital led him to write his trilogy on Attachment, Separation and Loss. In not conforming to the Oedipus complex and the bad breast narratives written by Freud and Klein, Bowlby became the outsider amongst his colleagues. Having a mind of his own, I suppose, we can say that Bowlby the man, wasn’t gaslighted.
My appreciation of the film “Gaslight” is not only for its advanced psychological thinking but more with its contributions to the English lexicon, its cognitive resonance and psycho-educational property. Emotional literacy is a way of being, not just knowing or doing, what helps individuals differentiate and enables people better to reach their feeling self. When we finally find a word that accurately matches our experiences, whether internally or externally, something inside us shifts since we feel we are being understood, and by way of doing so, we not only expand our awareness but better understand our rights as humans.
References
Bowlby, J. (1988). Knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel, pp 99 - 118, Secure Base. London: Routledge.
Gaslight (1944) film directed by George Cukor.
Hamilton, P. (1935). Gas Light, play. New York: Samuel French.
Liotti, G. (1991). Insecure attachment and agarophobia. In C. M. Parkes, J. Stevenson-Hinde & P. Marris. (Eds.). Attachment Across the Lifecycle, pp. 216– 233. London: Routledge.
Wellcome Collection, (2016). States Of Mind: Tracing The Edges of Consciousness. Exhibition, London, 4 February 2016 - 16 October 2016.
Orit Badouk Epstein is a UKCP registered attachment based Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a training supervisor and a training therapist. She trained at the Bowlby Centre, London where she is the Editor of the journal Attachment-New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis. She teaches Attachment theory and is the chair of the planning group of the Bowlby Memorial conference. She specialises in attachment theory and trauma and regularly writes and present papers and book chapters on these topics. She runs a private practice and works relationally with individuals, couples and parents. Orit has a particular interest in working with individuals who have experienced extreme abuse and trauma and have displayed symptoms of dissociation. She is the co-author of the book “Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs” (Karnac Books), co-editor of the book “Terror within & without” and is the co-editor of the ESTD (European Society for Trauma and Dissociation) newsletter where she regularly writes articles and film reviews.
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