Episode 21 - Gaslighting
Transcript
00:07
Ellie: Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
00:09
David: And I'm David Peña-Guzman.
00:10
Welcome to Overthink.
00:12
Ellie: The podcast where two friends,
00:14
David: who who are also professors,
00:16
Ellie: put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
00:18
David: Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
00:31
Ellie: Before we get into today's episode, we just want to say that you'll hear us
00:34
sometimes use words like crazy or insane.
00:36
We hope it's clear from the context that what we're referring to is accusations
00:40
that people are crazy or insane, and not that we buy into the use of those
00:44
terms, which are abelist in nature.
00:46
David: We also want to provide a content warning because in today's episode, we
00:49
discuss sexual violence and birth trauma.
00:52
Ellie: They come up in the second half of the episode.
00:56
David: It seems like everybody these days is talking about gaslighting.
01:01
It's one of those rare terms that is hot within academia and
01:04
outside of it at the same time.
01:06
Usually it's one or the other, right.
01:08
Either academics are super ahead of popular discourse or super behind it.
01:13
But right now, magically, they are in sync, and the synchronization
01:17
is happening over gaslighting.
01:20
Ellie: I know.
01:20
It's wild.
01:21
There's been a spate of academic journal issues and conferences
01:24
devoted to the topic, but then you also have like a lot of popular
01:27
op-eds and Instagram memes about it.
01:30
David: Yeah, for instance, in 2016, Lauren Duca wrote a piece for Teen
01:34
Vogue, which by the way has been killing it recently with their political
01:38
consciousness approach to reaching out to teens interested in fashion.
01:43
And she wrote a piece called "Donald Trump is Gaslighting America," in which
01:48
she enumerates all the tactics of social control and social manipulation used
01:53
by Donald Trump, and interprets them as a political form of gaslighting.
01:58
Ellie: Yeah.
01:59
And it's interesting you mentioned that as an example, in part because I do
02:02
think that that article had a lot of impact on the popularity of gaslighting.
02:08
And also because I think it's no coincidence that the term gaslighting
02:11
has gotten so much uptake during the Trump administration, because
02:15
he was, uh, Gaslighter in Chief.
02:19
I'm sure others have said the same thing, but in any case, I do worry that sometimes
02:23
gaslighting gets used so broadly that it no longer means anything at all.
02:27
So in the case of Trump, absolutely, he's a gaslighter.
02:30
However, I sometimes hear people accuse others of gaslighting them simply
02:35
when they disagree with them, right.
02:36
It's like, "Oh, your interpretation of what happened is different than mine.
02:39
Therefore you're gaslighting me."
02:40
David: Well, I don't know that I agree with that.
02:42
You are gaslighting me right now.
02:46
Ellie: Oh, wow.
02:47
Actually, I mean, the real tea is that I was at a gaslighting conference and
02:51
one of the conference participants accused another one of gaslighting her,
02:54
but that is a whole different story.
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David: That is so meta, academics accusing academics of gaslighting
03:00
them at a conference on gaslighting.
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I think this is kind of like the skit for a spoof of academics.
03:08
Ellie: Yeah.
03:08
And I didn't really know what to make of that situation exactly.
03:11
But just to say, yeah, it was very meta.
03:19
David: Today, we're talking about gaslighting.
03:21
Ellie: What is gaslighting and who gaslights whom?
03:24
David: How does gaslighting harm individuals, undermining
03:27
their very grip on reality?
03:29
Ellie: And how does it function more broadly in cultural settings,
03:32
through intersections of race, culture, gender, and the like?
03:37
David: Let's find out.
03:43
Ellie: The term gaslighting originates from the 1938 play, which was turned
03:46
into a movie in 1944, called Gaslight, which starred Ingrid Bergman.
03:51
In this story, a husband psychologically tortures his wife
03:54
by convincing her she is insane.
03:56
He dims the lights in the home, which is why it's entitled Gaslight, but he
04:01
convinces her that she's delusional when she asks whether it's gotten darker.
04:05
David: Yeah, and beyond the lights, he does all kinds of things to this poor
04:08
woman to mentally terrorize her and convince her that she's somehow unwell.
04:13
So, for example, he will steal things that belong to her and hide them and then
04:18
tell her that her memory is slipping away, or he also will hide his things in her
04:24
belongings, like in her purse, as a way of convincing her that she blacks out at
04:29
random moments and starts stealing things.
04:32
And there's this very powerful scene where he takes her to a fancy party and
04:37
makes a big display of her kleptomania by finding his watch in her purse, which
04:44
of course he had planted there all along.
04:46
And it really is a form of mental terrorism.
04:51
Ellie: And there's a scene from the movie that I think really exemplifies
04:54
the mental terrorism that's going on.
04:56
So let's check it out:
04:57
Gaslight: If I could only get inside that brain of yours and understand what
05:02
makes you do these crazy twisted things.
05:05
Gregory, are you trying to tell me I'm insane?
05:09
It's what I'm trying not to tell myself.
05:11
But that's what you think, isn't it?
05:13
That's what you've been hinting and suggesting for months now, ever since-
05:18
since the day I lost your brooch.
05:23
Your mother was mad.
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She died in an asylum when you were a year old.
05:30
That's not true.
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I've talked to the doctor who attended her.
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Would you like to see him?
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He described her symptoms to me.
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Do you like to hear them?
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It began with her imagining things, that she heard noises, footsteps, voices, and
05:44
then the voices began to speak to her.
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And at the end, she died in an asylum with no brain at all.
05:51
Oh!
05:53
Ellie: David, what strikes you about this clip?
05:55
David: For a long time, I've had an interest in the philosophy of
05:57
dreams and the difference between the dream world and the waking world.
06:02
And here you see that being weaponized through the man's claim
06:06
that this woman can no longer judge the difference between when she is
06:10
awake and when she's in a dream.
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So she enters these trance-like states over which she has zero executive control.
06:18
Ellie: Yeah.
06:19
Another thing that strikes me here is his claim towards the beginning
06:23
that he is really concerned that she might be going insane and that he
06:28
doesn't want to have to come to the conclusion that she's experiencing
06:32
delusions, but he's forced to, right.
06:35
And so there's this way that he's manipulating her, not by saying
06:39
like, "Oh yeah, you're crazy."
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But by saying, "Oh, I hate to come to this conclusion, but I feel I have no choice."
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David: And as if it's him who is the victim of circumstances, because
06:49
he married a woman, not knowing truly who she is and earlier, before
06:54
this clip, there are a few scenes in which he does precisely that.
06:58
He accuses her of having deceived him by not having told him that she suffers
07:03
from whatever condition he believes that she suffers and he constantly
07:07
threatens to take her to the doctor.
07:10
Ellie: And that charge that you're the one deceiving me is a very troubling one.
07:16
And it's part of what makes gaslighting so difficult for those experiencing
07:20
it, because it's hard to argue with somebody and say, no, I'm not deceiving
07:24
you because then they're just going to say, "Well, that's further proof
07:28
that you're deceiving me," right.
07:29
There's this way that this charge of you're deceiving me further serves to make
07:34
her question, "Well, am I deceiving him?"
07:36
Because she's in good faith, right.
07:38
Gaslighting trades on the gaslightee's good faith.
07:42
David: Yeah.
07:42
And in fact, there are several points in the movie where she comes to believe
07:46
that she has stolen the brooch, that she has stolen the watch, or she has
07:51
lost the letter, all these objects that become the placeholders for gaslighting.
07:56
And another thing that I find quite interesting about this clip
08:00
is the reference to the mother.
08:02
The fact that her mother was already unwell, and so there's already good
08:07
evidence, you know, in this case from biology, and it may be genetics, that
08:12
she has the same fate as her mother.
08:14
Ellie: Exactly.
08:15
So putting her insanity in the context of a family curse or a family malady
08:23
serves to further this idea that, "Well, yeah, you're probably just the same."
08:27
David: And it's inevitable that you will end up in an asylum, which again, is
08:31
what gets held over her as the ultimate threat, which in the 1940s, and what
08:37
we know about the history of psychology through the 19th century and early 20th
08:41
century, was a very real danger for women.
08:44
Ellie: Oh, yeah, with things like hysteria.
08:46
David: Yeah, exactly.
08:48
The term gaslighting originally appeared in the context of women
08:51
trapped in abusive relationships with men as in the case of Gaslight.
08:56
Feminists nowadays use it to talk about a specific way in which women are
09:00
oppressed by men, namely by having their understanding of their surroundings
09:05
manipulated, again typically in the context of a sexual or romantic dynamic.
09:10
Ellie: Yeah.
09:10
And we'll talk a little bit later about the detailed psychological dynamics
09:14
of this manipulation, but for now let's try and define gaslighting.
09:18
The definition of gaslighting doesn't inherently pertain to
09:21
the oppression of women by men.
09:23
One definition of gaslighting that I find useful is that eof philosopher Veronica
09:28
Ivy, who writes that gaslighting is a form of epistemic injustice in which a knower
09:34
is called to question their own reality.
09:37
David: And as its name indicates, epistemic injustice has to
09:40
do with epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge.
09:43
And it captures those acts of violence or injustice that harm somebody, not so
09:49
much physically, or even emotionally, but rather in their capacity as knowers,
09:54
by targeting what they know, how they know it, and to how much certainty they
09:59
have in the fact that they know it.
10:02
Ellie: So gaslighting as an epistemic injustice is a harm, right?
10:05
It's something that's like wrong.
10:06
You shouldn't do it to people and you shouldn't accept it if it's done to you.
10:11
However, the second half of the definition I think really points to the complexity
10:14
of gaslighting, the idea that a knower is called to question their own reality.
10:20
Usually philosophers as well as curious folks in general, think
10:24
that the idea of questioning our reality is a good thing, right?
10:27
We want to be challenged.
10:28
We recognize that we don't live as solitary minds in the universe
10:32
and that other people might have perceptions of things that are more
10:35
accurate than our own, or at least are different and worth considering.
10:39
And so what is it about gaslighting?
10:41
How can we figure out when our questioning our own reality is an
10:45
epistemic harm rather than just like an invitation to be curious about
10:50
something we didn't know already?
10:51
David: I think the way philosophers will answer that question is by
10:54
emphasizing that there is a meaningful difference between questioning specific
10:59
aspects of your reality, like your belief in A, B, or C, and losing
11:04
your grip over that which makes your entire reality hang together as one.
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So there's a difference between questioning particulars and
11:12
taking the rug out from under your feet, epistemologically speaking.
11:17
Ellie: Yeah but I think there are also some times when it's good to
11:20
have the rug taken out from under you.
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For instance, like when I teach Introduction to Philosophy and I
11:25
encourage students to question their sort of like dogmatic reception of science
11:30
and believing that if anything has a study behind it, it's suddenly right.
11:33
And so I guess I'm- I'm still left wondering what makes
11:38
gaslighting gaslighting.
11:39
And this is also, David, like, this is a genuine question.
11:41
Like I really wonder this.
11:43
David: Yeah.
11:43
And it's really difficult.
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One way in which I think about it is that one of the targets of
11:49
gaslighting is our subjective faculties, rather than the contents that those
11:54
faculties make available to us.
11:56
So when we think about the faculties of a subject, things like memory, imagination,
12:01
rationality, what gaslighting does above all is that it convinces people
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that they can no longer rely on their typical modes of going about the world
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and acquiring knowledge about the world so that they no longer have faith in
12:16
themselves or in their capacity to know anything with any degree of certainty.
12:21
So everything is suddenly up for question, and I think we can agree that
12:24
when everything is up for question, without the possibility of any kind
12:28
of grounding, then we have a problem.
12:30
Ellie: I think you're onto something there, but by that definition,
12:34
somebody like Socrates, who famously said, "What makes me wise is that
12:38
I know that I don't know anything," would be the victim of gaslighting.
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So I would be inclined less to define gaslighting in terms of its ability
12:48
to make somebody question their own reality and more in terms of sort of
12:52
identifying further what the epistemic injustice that Ivy mentions is.
12:58
And one way that I think about the epistemic injustice there, or the harm
13:02
that's done to somebody who's being gaslight, is that when they question
13:07
their own reality, that questioning is manipulated and used by another person
13:14
in order to further undermine them and give them no potential for actually
13:18
coming to knowledge of something.
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So it's like a refusal to engage with the person who's questioning their own
13:26
reality, sort of like on equal footing, and instead using their doubt and saying,
13:32
"Oh yes, you doubt that you should doubt all of these other things as well."
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It's like an opportunity that they're taking advantage of.
13:40
I don't know if that really gets us very far either though.
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David: I mean by that definition then, Socrates himself would be also potentially
13:46
a gaslighter because that, yeah, maybe because that's what he does, right.
13:49
He goes around Athens, constantly making people question all their beliefs.
13:54
And claiming that he himself has no positive beliefs in anything.
13:58
He's just the master of the method of questioning, but there is never
14:01
really a point in Socrates' life at which he questions his own ability
14:07
to reason and to argue, right.
14:09
He's fully committed to the idea that he is the smartest person in the world,
14:13
which is what the Oracle told him, right.
14:15
He goes to the Oracle and the Oracle of Delphi says, "There is
14:19
no person smarter than Socrates."
14:21
And he sort of eats it up and runs with it.
14:24
So his own ability to resign is never in question.
14:27
Ellie: Okay.
14:28
And, you know, taking this sample of Socrates as potential gaslighter
14:32
in a slightly different direction, I think what's interesting is that we
14:37
made a case that maybe Socrates should be understood as both a victim of
14:41
gaslighting and as a gaslighter, which like I definitely do not want to, you
14:46
know, stake a claim about that, just more like a sort of silly thought experiment.
14:50
But I think this does get it an interesting question, which is
14:55
the status of the gaslighter.
14:58
My sense is that a lot of gaslighting happens in cycles where somebody
15:03
who is gaslighting has also been gaslit themselves and is using those
15:08
manipulation tactics on other people, or maybe even like in some cases the
15:13
same people can gaslit each other and also be gaslit by each other.
15:16
I'm not sure about that.
15:17
But I do think that this raises the very important issue of whether
15:23
gaslighting is deliberate or not.
15:25
Does a gaslighter need to know that they are doing the gaslighting?
15:29
David: Well, I'm curious about your thoughts about this.
15:32
What would an accidental, unintentional form of gaslighting look like?
15:39
Ellie: So one of the examples that comes to mind remaining within the scope of
15:43
individual relations to each other, so leaving aside for now, structural, racial,
15:47
and cultural gaslighting, which we'll talk about a little bit later, I'm reminded
15:51
of the example that Veronica Ivy gives in her piece "Allies Behaving Badly," which
15:56
is about how cisgender allies of trans folks sometimes gaslit those trans folks.
16:01
And Ivy distinguishes between what she calls a psychological form of
16:05
gaslighting, which is what we see in the movie Gaslight, it's a deliberate form
16:09
of psychological warfare and what she calls a more subtle, often unintentional
16:14
form of gaslighting, and this she describes as occurring when a listener
16:18
doesn't believe a speaker's testimony.
16:21
And this is due to the speaker having a credibility deficit, due to an
16:25
identity stereotype or a prejudice.
16:28
So for instance, the accusation that a white man might make of a Black woman,
16:33
who's experiencing racism in the workplace and is already at a deficit because Black
16:39
women's knowledge is not valorized in the way that white men's knowledge is.
16:43
And so when she says, "I'm experiencing racism in the workplace," he doubts
16:48
her simply by virtue of the fact that he has this narrative of like, well,
16:52
of course, she would see things that aren't there because she would be
16:55
seeing a racism that doesn't exist by virtue of her own black womanhood.
17:00
David: In that case, I definitely agree with you that gaslighting can
17:04
be unintentional and it can be subtle.
17:06
So it's kind of the death by a thousand paper cuts form of gaslighting.
17:11
Uh, so it's more like, gas matching, with just like little matches
17:15
being lit over and over again.
17:18
Yeah.
17:18
I just made that term up to contrast that with the more
17:20
intentional kind of centralized approach that we see in the movie.
17:24
Ellie: I don't know.
17:25
I don't know about that term.
17:26
David, maybe like mini gaslighting.
17:28
David: You don't need gas for matches.
17:33
So maybe it's like- matching, match-lighting, match-lighting is
17:37
the right one, um, or paper clipping.
17:41
Ellie: Okay.
17:41
Touché.
17:42
David: Uh, papercutting.
17:42
Papercutting might be better.
17:45
Well because of the death by a thousand paper cuts.
17:47
Anyhow, um, moving away from my unreliable, metaphorical faculty,
17:51
what I like about this unintentional, non-deliberative way of thinking about
17:56
gaslighting is that it puts gaslighting in dialogue with other concepts that have
18:00
been relatively useful for people doing anti-racist, anti-sexist work and so on,
18:06
like the concept of implicit bias, or the concept of unconscious prejudices,
18:11
whereby our acts and our behaviors, even unbeknownst to ourselves, are already
18:16
slanted in particular ways, by virtue of the culture of which we are apart.
18:21
Ellie: I like the way that you put that, because I think you're right
18:24
that gaslighting helps us, for instance, understand what's going
18:27
on with microaggressions, which are little behaviors or statements that
18:32
serve to stereotype and/or devalued people in different situations.
18:37
And, if someone experiences a lot of microaggressions and then calls
18:42
that situation, what it is and the people who have been perpetrating the
18:45
microaggressions are like, we didn't do anything, right, I think it's fair game
18:50
to call that gaslighting because you are undermining a person's perception
18:54
and sense of reality so I think the expansion of gaslighting to include forms
19:00
of manipulation or behaviors that aren't deliberate is really important, because it
19:05
helps us make sense of things like that.
19:06
But I also wonder whether it's a double-edged sword, because then it leaves
19:09
us open to all of these very complicated adjudications of whose reality is right.
19:16
And that doesn't seem to me to be so much a problem with something like
19:19
microaggressions in the workplace, because I would simply say, "Hey,
19:22
the Black woman who's experiencing microaggressions has more authority
19:25
to talk about the microaggressions she's experiencing than the white man."
19:28
And so I like, I feel pretty comfortable with saying who's in the right there,
19:32
but there are a lot of other cases, for instance, interpersonal relationships
19:36
where people are manipulating one another, where the reality of the
19:39
situation may not be super clear cut.
19:41
And it's really hard to figure out, when people are co-constituting a
19:45
given situation, whose interpretation is right, especially when people are
19:49
accusing each other of gaslighting.
19:52
David: Yeah, but I think when we're talking about gaslighting,
19:54
we're going beyond merely having interpersonal conflict that is part
20:00
and parcel of living together or being part of the same community.
20:04
We are talking about a harmful way of affecting other people's
20:09
realities, again by making them come to question things that ask subjects,
20:14
they are entitled not to question.
20:16
So I still want to hold on to a distinction between those more
20:20
general forms of interpersonal conflict and what we might call
20:23
gaslighting, even if, of course like with every distinction, the in-between
20:27
is a little bit gray and porous.
20:29
Ellie: Yeah.
20:30
And I think when theorists of, and are talking about gaslighting, they're
20:33
usually doing so in a way that refers to what Karen Adkins describes as wreaking
20:38
significant epistemic and moral damages through small, often invisible actions.
20:45
So there is something extraordinarily intense about gaslighting, and
20:49
I just wonder whether that's a little bit at odds with some of the
20:52
ways that gaslighting gets thrown around in everyday discourse today.
20:56
David: And what these theorists are also recognizing is that in spite
20:59
of their diversity, gaslighting tactics follow recognizable patterns.
21:05
So they fall into certain types or into certain categories that
21:08
allow us to classify them, to name them, and to come to better
21:12
understand their internal mechanics.
21:14
For instance, the philosopher Cynthia Stark argues that gaslighting often
21:19
involves two tactics, which she calls sidestepping and displacing.
21:24
And we know that it involves a lot of other tactics that have other names, but
21:28
these two in particular stand out for her.
21:30
Sidestepping is dodging evidence that supports the testimony of the victim.
21:35
So when the woman says, "No, you are making me believe all these
21:40
things that are not real," the gas lighter will simply change the
21:44
subject or simply dodge the issue.
21:47
Now what Stark calls displacing is a slightly different tactic, which
21:51
entails attributing defects in thinking or perceiving or remembering, or just
21:56
character flaws in general, to the victim.
21:58
So for instance, your memory is fading, we know that you can't really think
22:03
rationally because you know, it runs in your family or whatever the case might be.
22:07
And according to her, these strategies appear again and
22:12
again in cases of gaslighting.
22:14
Ellie: Well, and that's so helpful actually, David, because I do think that
22:17
helps resolve some of my worries about the leaky nature of the concept gaslighting,
22:23
because I think it's really important to locate the mechanism of gaslighting in
22:28
the way that the gaslighter responds to the victims questioning their own reality,
22:34
right, rather than like gaslighting just happening on the side of the victim
22:37
or on the side of the perpetrator, we have this relational dimension here.
22:42
And so these two tactics of sidestepping and displacing I think are really
22:45
useful because once we see one of those, rather than a genuine engagement
22:49
or reckoning with the victim's reality, that's when we have a case
22:54
of gaslighting rather than a simple disagreement about a state of affairs.
22:58
David: Yeah.
22:58
So if I'm fighting with my roommate and I say, "Hey, roommate, let's sit down
23:02
because you're doing all these things that are bothering me," and we have to
23:05
process that so that we can live together, what my roommate ideally will do is
23:10
listen to what I have to say, and then work with me in trying to resolve it.
23:13
And even if they don't quite agree on the details, they might say, "Look,
23:18
I'm sorry that you're feeling this way.
23:20
I just see it differently."
23:22
Even that is something that the gaslighter will never do, because the gaslighter will
23:27
always adopt a unilateral interpretation of who is at fault and that's never them.
23:32
Ellie: Exactly.
23:33
Yeah.
23:33
There's like no recognition of the relational co-constitution
23:36
of the situation.
23:37
And I also just want to say that, I think I have now decided that Socrates
23:41
is not a gas lighter because sidestepping and displacing are not tactics he uses.
23:46
He wants to get into the meat of the conflict.
24:06
David: We can think about the psychology of gaslighting from two different,
24:10
although related, angles, that have the perpetrator, who is doing the
24:14
gaslighting and that of the victim, who is at the receiving end of it.
24:17
I want us to talk about both of these angles, but let's start
24:20
with the psychology of the victim.
24:22
Ellie: Yeah, I think most women are probably familiar with the experience
24:27
of being called crazy, right.
24:30
David: Definitely.
24:30
Ellie: And I, by no means, want to say that all women experienced
24:33
gaslighting in the same way, right.
24:35
That would be a horribly non-intersectional approach.
24:38
But I do think it's very common for women to get called crazy.
24:42
And this being used to undermine their authority.
24:45
And I'm not- not speaking from personal experience or anything.
24:52
Um, but I think what happens in gaslighting is that it's not just
24:55
about undermining somebody's authority, but it's also about undermining
24:58
their very sense of reality.
25:01
So, as you said earlier, David, it's like, you're not just having something
25:03
you believe questioned, you're having the rug pulled out from under you entirely.
25:09
So gaslighting serves to make people doubt their perception of events.
25:13
And it's a successful tool of manipulation because it leads the victim to adopt
25:17
the gaslighter's perspective over their own, partly because the gaslighter
25:21
just seems so confident that they are right and that the victim is wrong.
25:25
David: And again, it goes all the way to making victims believe that they
25:29
can no longer adjudicate the difference between the dream world and the real
25:32
world, which to me just highlights how deep gaslighting cuts, because that's
25:38
probably one of the most fundamental distinctions that we need just to
25:41
function in the world, right, to know that, "Hey, this, this is reality now."
25:46
And this is exactly what happens in that movie, uh, Rosemary's Baby.
25:50
This is like another example of gaslighting and film because in that-
25:55
Ellie: way.
25:55
David: Yeah.
25:55
So in that film, the main woman, Rosemary, is raped by the devil in her sleep.
26:02
And then she kind of wakes up in the middle of it and has
26:05
this weird kind of half memory, half dreamlike experience of it.
26:10
And when she wakes up, she asks her husband like what happened last night?
26:14
And he's like, "Oh yeah, you and I had sex.
26:17
Um, it was me the whole time.
26:18
You were just kind of not really awake and not really asleep."
26:22
And then meanwhile, she's got the devil's baby inside her.
26:25
Ellie: Oh my God.
26:26
Yeah.
26:26
And I think gaslighting around sexual violence is just so rampant.
26:32
That is where the banality of evil exists, in this idea that women are constantly
26:37
led to believe, well, you probably asked for it, or what were you wearing, right.
26:42
That's a form of gaslighting the victim, precisely using that tool that
26:46
you talked about from Cynthia Stark, which is the tool of displacing,
26:50
attributing to a defect in character what happened to the victim.
26:54
David: And the case of sexual violence highlights what we've
26:57
described as the epistemic harm associated with gaslighting.
27:02
And it brings to the fore that credibility deficit from which women suffer under
27:07
patriarchy because what we know from these cases is that systematically, when
27:11
women say I have been raped, I have been sexually harassed, I've been sexually
27:16
assaulted, people don't believe it.
27:19
They just don't think that it is true.
27:22
Um, and this includes school counselors, this includes judges,
27:27
this includes police officers.
27:29
It includes even family members.
27:31
And so it brings to the fore that epistemological dimension about who
27:35
knows what, and under what conditions.
27:38
Ellie: Yeah.
27:38
Because women already aren't believed as much as men are in society, and you
27:43
know, a different aspect of the psychology of being gaslit turns on isolating
27:48
the victim from their support network.
27:51
So for instance, a lot of perpetrators of gaslighting, especially when gaslighting
27:54
is happening in the context of intimate relationships that are abusive, will
27:57
tell the victim's friends and family members that this person is just
28:01
going through a difficult time, right.
28:04
This is one way that perpetrators get to seem like they're in
28:07
the right, because they're just looking out for the person, right?
28:10
Like, "Oh, it's so terrible.
28:11
She's just being a little crazy right now.
28:13
Or she's going through a hard time."
28:16
Telling the victim's friends and family I'm really looking out for
28:19
her is a version of concern trolling, This idea that like you're trolling
28:23
somebody by feigning concern for them.
28:25
David: Yeah.
28:26
And that happens in the film over and over again, where the guy will say, "I don't
28:31
want to send you to the asylum, but again, I might have to for your own wellbeing."
28:36
And I want to return to the point that we made about how this is carried out through
28:40
microaggressions, because in many cases, all of these microaggressions that, again,
28:44
add to this concern trolling are hidden or in many cases passed off as jokes.
28:51
And I find the weaponization of humor in particular to be an important element
28:57
for understanding the psychology of gaslighting, because its ultimate goal
29:01
really is to convince the victim that they are over-reactive as a way of, in fact,
29:07
rendering them over accepting, right?
29:09
If you break somebody down by convincing them that any kind of
29:13
resistance they might put up is evidence of their fragility, then
29:17
you, in fact, render them fragile.
29:19
And they will take all the bullshit that you want to throw their way.
29:22
Ellie: Yes.
29:22
And I think that's a great example of the way that the victim ends up feeling
29:26
totally broken down in character.
29:29
They not only don't trust themselves, but they actually lose a sense of themselves
29:33
entirely and sort of end up needing to glom on to the perpetrator's view of
29:38
reality and maybe also their identity, just to have some sort of life raft.
29:43
David: And your comments about how the victim is isolated points to the
29:47
impossibility of finding that raft.
29:50
In the movie, the woman is isolated in every imaginable way by her husband.
29:56
He will hide her mail, letters that her family sent her, expressing
30:00
concern about her wellbeing, he will intercept them and then tell her
30:04
that they're not writing to her.
30:06
He will also convince the housekeepers that she is accusing them of doing
30:11
the stealing, which is not true as a way of, again, alienating her
30:15
from the other people in the house.
30:17
Ellie: Wow.
30:17
David: So all around from the beginning to the end of the movie, phenomenologically
30:22
speaking, this woman just experiences the walls closing in on her from every
30:27
possible angle, until she's alone in the middle of the ocean without a life raft.
30:33
Ellie: Yeah.
30:33
And I think the idea of alone is complex here because on the
30:36
one hand you're absolutely right that the victim is isolated and
30:39
cut off from her support system.
30:43
At the same time, in a sense she's not alone, because she doesn't even have
30:47
her own personal identity or integrity as an individual anymore, right.
30:52
She's like just a shell of a human or just like reduced to a puddle that becomes
30:57
part of the puddle of the perpetrator.
31:00
All right we're in a weird way with metaphors here now.
31:02
David: No, but I think the idea of being alienated, not just from others, but
31:06
also from yourself is captured really beautifully and really powerfully
31:11
in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, in which this woman again
31:15
is gaslit by her husband and she just slowly recedes into the background,
31:20
becoming part of the wallpaper.
31:22
So she is-
31:23
Ellie: Yes.
31:23
That early feminist classic story.
31:26
David: Yeah.
31:26
And so she just sort of blends into her surroundings, disappearing like a ghost.
31:31
Ellie: Yeah.
31:32
That's a really interesting connection.
31:34
What do you think is happening on the perpetrator's side while all
31:37
of this is happening to the victim?
31:39
David: Well, I mean beyond the fact that there are POS', I'm not sure where to take
31:45
this in a philosophically rigorous manner.
31:47
But when I think about gaslighters, it's true that I do think about the
31:51
classical case of the manipulating husband who pulls the strings in
31:55
a choreographed orchestrated way.
31:58
But I also think about the more subtle, unintentional, maybe even
32:02
unconscious, forms of gaslighting that we talked about earlier.
32:07
And I think the lightness of the aggressions, their micro-ness, is
32:13
absolutely essential for understanding the psychology of the perpetrator,
32:17
because it allows them to not cross a certain threshold, which is typically
32:22
physical violence or verbal violence.
32:24
So that you can in fact have certainly the mastermind approach to gaslighting,
32:29
uh, where you're executing a strategy that maybe you've planned ahead of
32:32
time, but then you also have, again, those men who, in the process of
32:36
gaslighting, truly convinced themselves that they're not really gaslighters.
32:42
They're just nice guys who are trying to look out for the
32:45
well-being of the women around them.
32:47
And I think the latter are just as dangerous as the former.
32:51
Ellie: So gaslighters are often trying to turn their victim into their
32:54
fantasy of what the victim should be.
32:57
I think what's happening a lot with gaslighters is a denial
33:00
of another person's autonomy.
33:02
They- they might not even actually realize that they want to deny somebody else's
33:06
autonomy, they just think that they have a grasp on reality, complete hold on it.
33:10
They're what philosophers call solipsists, and the psychologist Eleanor
33:13
Greenberg writes about this dimension of gaslighting as changing the victim,
33:17
which can sometimes take a literal form, so like demanding that they
33:21
change their hair, their dress, their mannerisms, all of which are really
33:24
classic signals of domestic abuse.
33:27
But it can also be takes subtler forms of wanting to change their personality,
33:30
their values, and that sort of thing, all these disorienting tactics.
33:34
David: Yeah.
33:34
It's like men, as a class, we suffer from a Pygmalion syndrome, right.
33:38
We want to create these fantasies in our image and we get off on the
33:43
idea that we have that shaping power.
33:46
Ellie: When you're talking about this, David, all I have in my head
33:48
is that Chicks song, "Gaslighter," which goes, "Gaslighter!
33:53
Denier!".
33:55
And I will stop there and let listeners now have it in their head for the rest
33:57
of the episode, if you've heard it.
33:59
If you haven't, may check it.
34:00
David: Is that a recent song?
34:01
Ellie: Yeah.
34:01
They came out with an album called Gaslighter in what was it like, 2019?
34:06
David: Also, who are the Chicks?
34:08
Ellie: 2020.
34:09
Oh, formerly the Dixie Chicks.
34:10
They-
34:10
David: Oh, Oh yeah.
34:12
Okay.
34:12
Okay.
34:13
It's like, uh, Lady Antebellum and Lady A.
34:15
Ellie: Exactly.
34:16
Lady A.
34:18
Um, speaking of racism, let's talk about racial gaslighting, cultural gaslighting,
34:23
and other forms of structural gaslighting.
34:33
David: If you're enjoying overthink, please rate and review us on Apple
34:36
podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
34:49
. Ellie: So as we've discussed, the term gaslighting originated in
34:52
the context of abusive romantic relationships between men and women.
34:57
But a lot of theorists have realized that the term describes a much
35:00
wider phenomenon, transcending its original context and applying
35:04
not just to individuals, but actually to social groups.
35:08
And I'm thinking here about recent articles on gaslighting, including
35:12
Nora Berenstain's article on structural gaslighting, which is called "White
35:15
Feminist Gaslighting" and Elena Ruiz's concept of cultural gaslighting.
35:20
David: So how do they define those terms?
35:22
Ellie: So structural gaslighting as Berenstain describes it basically
35:26
obscures the connections between structures of oppression and the patterns
35:31
of harm that are related to them.
35:33
So for instance, going back to that example earlier about a Black woman
35:36
who's experiencing microaggressions in the workplace and sees that as
35:39
part of a broader system of racial domination, that woman is gaslit if
35:44
HR or her boss or whomever fails to recognize that the harm is being done
35:48
to her are part of a long history of anti-Black racism in the US, and makes
35:54
it seem like what's actually a political problem is just a personal problem.
35:57
David: So is structural gaslighting then the same as cultural gaslighting?
36:03
Ellie: No.
36:04
Structural gaslighting is broader than cultural gaslighting, because
36:07
you can have structures that don't, say, relate to culture, at
36:09
least as far as I understand it.
36:11
But Ruiz defines cultural gaslighting as social and historical support
36:16
mechanisms that basically produce abusive mental environments within
36:19
settler colonial structures, and these end up furthering the ends of
36:23
cultural genocide and dispossession.
36:25
So they basically encouraged colonized folks to think that they're deserving
36:30
of colonization and to erase entire histories of oppression and genocide.
36:35
David: Yeah.
36:36
And because these concepts of structural and cultural gaslighting shift our focus
36:41
from the individual to the broader social structures and cultural patterns
36:45
that shape our lives, again, without our conscious intention, they help us make
36:50
sense of multiple forms of discrimination and not just discrimination on the
36:55
basis of sex as it appears originally in that movie and the first wave of
36:59
scholarly research on gaslighting.
37:02
For example, the philosopher of disability, Shelley Tremain, wrote an
37:06
essay about gaslighting in connection to disability, in which she applies this
37:10
concept of structural gaslighting to what we call mental illness and the ways
37:15
in which people typically deemed mad quote unquote, are gaslit by the very
37:21
medical establishment that creates the categories of mental illness and mental
37:26
health, putting them into these boxes on account of not being neuro-typical.
37:31
And there is a quote in her essay that I want to cite, because I think it
37:34
captures the essence of her argument.
37:37
She writes:
37:38
"People who, for any number of reasons, do not conform to highly regulated
37:42
standards of, for instance, social behavior and interaction, such as
37:47
people who are classified as quote unquote, mentally ill or perceived to
37:51
be insane, are routinely discredited, ignored, vilified, and stigmatized.
37:58
Until the relatively recent formation and rise of the mad pride movement
38:03
and related social movements, the hermeneutical resources that many
38:07
disabled people required to collectively understand the political character of
38:12
their situation were unavailable to them."
38:15
Ellie: And I think Tremain's point about gaslighting in the context
38:17
of disability provides a point of conversation with feminist accounts of
38:21
gaslighting in the medical establishment or what is called medical gaslighting.
38:26
It's very well-documented that women are often not believed as much
38:30
as men are when they report their pain or other medical ailments.
38:34
And this is especially a problem for fat women, who are often distrusted
38:38
and their own accounts of pain and other medical ailments, and also
38:42
women of color, especially Black women.
38:44
You can't talk about the medical establishment in the US without talking
38:48
about the history of horrific terrors that have been perpetrated against Black
38:52
women, especially enslaved Black women, who then were also gaslit and made
38:56
to think that their pain wasn't real or that their injuries were imagined.
39:01
David: Yes.
39:02
I recently read an article precisely about this that was published in the
39:05
Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics in 2001, which argues that for example,
39:11
women, and they did not control for race, so it talks about women as a
39:14
category rather than say, Black women, are underprescribed painkillers because
39:20
doctors typically assume that they're being overly dramatic and catastrophic.
39:24
So women presenting with the same symptoms as men will simply be told that, "Oh,
39:30
you know, it's probably in your head.
39:32
Maybe you're just stressed out.
39:34
Maybe it's not as big of a deal as you're making it out to be.
39:37
So here take a Tylenol and you'll be fine in a couple of days."
39:41
Ellie: Yeah.
39:41
And this is especially a problem for Black women because historically,
39:45
racial pseudoscience from the 18th and 19th centuries literally
39:49
believed that black people had higher pain thresholds than white folks.
39:54
For instance, this was one reason that chattel slavery was justified.
39:57
It's like, "Oh, well, they don't experience pain in the
39:59
same way that white people do.
40:00
They can stay out in the sun longer than white people can."
40:03
And this led to things like Black enslaved women being
40:06
experimented on without anesthesia.
40:10
David: Well and in connection to this, I think it's important for us to recognize
40:13
that this is not only historical.
40:14
It continues in the present, because researchers have found that even today,
40:20
more than 50% of med school graduates will say yes to the question of
40:27
whether Black people's skin is slightly thicker than white people's skin.
40:32
So we're talking about 21st century people who are going into medicine
40:37
as doctors having easily refutable beliefs about the science of race.
40:43
Ellie: Oh my God.
40:44
It's just unconscionable.
40:46
I'm also thinking here about Black women's mortality rates
40:49
in pregnancy and childbirth.
40:50
Black women are three to four times more likely to be at risk of pregnancy
40:55
related deaths than white women are.
40:57
I think this really came to the fore a couple of years ago when Serena
41:00
Williams almost died in childbirth.
41:02
Williams has a history of developing blood clots and she developed one
41:06
after giving birth to her daughter.
41:08
When Williams went to the hospital for this, for severe symptoms, including
41:12
coughing that was so intense that she ripped her C-section wound, she
41:16
was not taken seriously by the nurse.
41:18
And this is particularly egregious in the case of Serena Williams, because as
41:22
a world-class athlete, she knows her body better than like anybody else, right.
41:27
And so the idea that a nurse would not take her account of what was going
41:31
on seriously is particularly damning.
41:34
She knew that she had a history of blood clots.
41:36
She told the nurse, "Hey, I think I know what's going on."
41:38
But the nurse thought that Williams' pain medication might've been confusing her.
41:43
So basically Serena Williams ultimately recovered, but medical
41:46
gaslighting almost led to her death.
41:48
David: Yeah.
41:48
It's like, "Oh, Serena Williams, you're telling me all these
41:51
facts about your medical history.
41:53
You are dreaming, this is nothing but a dream."
41:56
You know, it's like weird racial Houdini-ism, uh, within
42:00
the medical establishment.
42:02
Ellie: God.
42:02
I don't know if I like love that term or hate it because it just seems
42:05
like, like, the story is so fucked up.
42:07
I hate the idea of having like a funny term to associate with it,
42:11
but I also think your term is-
42:12
David: Well, I don't think the term is funny particularly, and I
42:15
do think it's accurate insofar as it involves as sleight of hand, kind of
42:19
in the style of magicians, and what do magicians do other than control
42:24
our perception of reality, including our perception of our own reality.
42:28
And Serena Williams' experience with medical gaslighting almost embodies, in
42:33
the flesh, Ruiz's definition of medical gaslighting, which she defines as quote:
42:39
"The interpersonal phenomenon of having once experience of illness
42:43
marginalized, including having one's self-reported or presenting symptoms
42:48
downplayed, silenced, or psychologically manipulated by a clinical provider
42:53
or healthcare professionals."
42:54
So this is exactly what happened to Serena.
42:57
She said, "I am having these symptoms and I am telling you what they mean."
43:02
And both the presentation and the interpretation of the symptoms
43:05
were called into question.
43:07
Ellie: And I think a lot of women can relate to some form of
43:10
experience of medical gaslighting.
43:12
Like- like even I have been medically gaslit and I am a white,
43:16
thin, able-bodied young woman.
43:19
Um, without going into like too much detail here, I had some digestive issues
43:23
that were long misdiagnosed, and weirdly like totally downplayed to the point that
43:28
my doctor at some points would say, like, "There's nothing wrong with you, I don't
43:32
know why you're making up problems."
43:33
And then on the other hand would go to extremes and be like, actually,
43:37
"I think you have this really intense disease, which luckily I didn't have."
43:40
And so, yeah, the- the truth was more somewhere in the middle and now I've
43:44
been able to like sort out my digestive issues, um, which like, frankly just
43:48
came down to the fact that I am lactose intolerant and nobody ever noticed.
43:52
And my point is like this is nothing compared to the story
43:55
of Serena Williams, right?
43:56
And to the stories of so many fat women, Black women, disabled women, and women
44:00
of other intersections of identity that have less privilege than I do.
44:03
David: Yeah.
44:03
And so it's important to keep the intersections in mind, but it's
44:06
also important to keep the overall pattern that this is something
44:10
that happens to women more than men in the medical establishment.
44:14
And in a piece published in The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters makes the argument that
44:19
the entire industry of alternative medicine, which, you know, can include
44:24
some more helpful things and some less helpful things, on the less helpful end
44:29
of things, I'm imagining somebody like Gwyneth Paltrow, um, but this entire
44:34
industry was built on the back of this history of doctors being dismissive of
44:40
women's health concerns, especially around reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth,
44:45
which forced women effectively to start looking for anything or anybody that
44:50
might actually listen to their concerns.
44:53
And so it's medicine's fault that people don't have faith in it.
44:58
Ellie: And I will say that that exclusion of women's knowledges, indigenous
45:03
knowledges, and other forms of knowledge production that don't adhere to the,
45:07
you know, very rigid model of medicine have led to it's being very difficult to
45:13
separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to alternative medicine, the
45:17
Gwyneth Paltrows from the actual healers.
45:20
David: That's right.
45:20
And I think here about a case of medical gaslighting along the lines of gender that
45:25
hits very close to home, which is that when my mother gave birth to my younger
45:30
brother, who is, uh, right now in his teens, she was major- yeah, hi, José, uh,
45:37
she was majorly gaslit by the hospital where she gave birth, because she gave
45:43
birth to her son then she took him home.
45:46
And for a while, she had to battle the hospital over a bill for an abortion
45:52
where they tried to convince her that she didn't have the baby that
45:55
she had and that she was holding.
45:57
So she's like, I don't know how to prove to you that I had my baby other than-
46:03
Ellie: Oh my God,
46:04
David: it's like habeas corpus.
46:05
I produced the body.
46:06
Like it's here.
46:08
Like I can just put it off, like I'll just show up and put it on the table, I guess.
46:12
Um-
46:14
Ellie: So obscene.
46:15
David: So there was this protracted battle between my family and the hospital
46:20
over thousands of dollars that they wanted to charge over this mysterious
46:25
abortion that never took place, but they were convinced my brother did not exist.
46:30
Ellie: I'm hoping, at least in that case, your mom was not gaslit
46:33
in the sense of actually having her reality be undermined, right?
46:36
David: Yeah, no, I mean, hard to doubt the existence of like, a kid that's,
46:42
you know, attached to your hand.
46:45
That would be kind of funny if later in life she's like, I didn't have you really.
46:51
Ellie: She's continuing cycle of gaslighting by convincing
46:53
José that he doesn't exist.
46:56
David: There is a paper trail of his non-existence.
46:58
Ellie: Well, on this note of encouraging David's younger brother to doubt his
47:02
own existence just as Socrates would have done, thanks for joining us today.
47:06
David: Have a great day.
47:11
Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.
47:13
Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever
47:17
you listen to your podcasts.
47:19
David: You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life
47:23
advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.
47:27
Ellie: You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.
47:32
We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K.
47:37
Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
47:40
David: Thanks so much for joining us today.