Gaslighting in politics: how a female experience became universalised

“But he’s gaslighting her!”. I first heard the term “gaslighting” during a discussion with a British friend in 2019. We were talking about a relationship in which one half of the couple no longer trusted her memories, and found herself going over calls and messages to verify that what she thought she remembered was true. For my interlocutor there was no doubt: our acquaintance was a victim of gaslighting.

According to American psychoanalyst Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide (Rodale Press, 2007 and 2023), “gaslighting is a powerful, insidious often covert form of psychological manipulation, repeated over time, that erodes a person’s trust in their own perception of reality, judgement and in extreme cases, their own sanity. It’s not an individual pathology – it thrives in the emotional soil of unequal relationships”.

“While gaslighting can occur across all gender identities”, continues Stern, “ it disproportionately affects women, but not because women are inherently more vulnerable. Women are historically socialised and taught to ‘be nice’ and to please, but because patriarchy has long sanctioned male authority and discredited female perception.”

In recent years, gaslighting has also become a political category, reflecting a broader trend of using psychological concepts to explain the collective phenomena and dynamics of our time. “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”, ran a Teen Vogue headline in 2016, in reference to “[Donald] Trump’s systematic attempts to destabilise the truth and weaken the foundation of American freedom”. Through his tweets and statements, Trump has spread a long list of lies, never bothering to verify, correct or refute. As American essayist Rebecca Solnit has pointed out, Trump’s first election victory made gaslighting “ an indispensable word in public life”.

Between psychology and politics: the male fantasy of domination

The term originated in the British play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton, first staged in London in 1938. The play was a huge success - King George VI brought his wife to see it - and in 1944 it became a film directed by George Cukor, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. The film tells the story of a marriage in which the husband manipulates his wife by lying to her and changing small elements in the house, for example dimming the lights in the gas lamps, to the point that she begins to doubt her own perception and mental health.

At the time of Hamilton’s play and Cukor’s film, the issue of domestic abuse was not a matter of public debate. But today, more than 80 years later, the play’s title has entered common parlance to portray a form of relational and political abuse.

In 2016, “gaslight” was named the “most useful word” of the year by the American Dialect Society; in 2018, Oxford Dictionaries listed it as one of the “words of the year” – a choice replicated in 2022 by the American Merriam-Webster dictionary, after online searches for the term had increased by 1740 percent over the previous year. “In this age of misinformation – of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes – gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time,” Merriam-Webster explained. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries had chosen “post-truth”, another term describing an obfuscation of truth typical of our time.

“My years of experience as a therapist – and witness to the effect of gaslighting – have illuminated the personal cost of this dynamic – the internal disorientation and erosion of self-trust. What begins as minor corrections – ’You’re too sensitive,’ ‘You must be remembering that wrong’ – can, over time, turn into a profound unraveling of self-belief,” explains Robin Stern.

Gaslighting consists of a reversal of responsibility: those who engage in it do not deny the truth of an issue, but shift the problem onto the other person, attacking them for their way of being.

Today, however, the popularity of the term is due more to its political usage, especially in the English-speaking world. “The American popularization of psychological language is both a cultural signature and a sociopolitical phenomenon,” explains Stern. According to the psychoanalyst, decades of activism in the US – from second-wave feminism to the #MeToo movement – and later the political rise of Trump, paved the way for psychological terms to become part of everyday discourse. “What began in the clinical world showed up into living rooms, classrooms, and eventually, into the vernacular of social media and protest.”

In contrast, many European countries, “especially those with deep traditions in psychoanalysis like France and Italy – have historically treated emotional experience as something to be explored in philosophical or literary terms rather than operationalised for public use. In these cultures, the analytic language remains more cloistered, and perhaps more skeptical of what’s sometimes seen as the American ‘therapeutic turn’”.

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‘While interpersonal gaslighting distorts one individual’s sense of self and truth, political gaslighting seeks to distort or re-write a population’s shared reality’ – Robin Stern

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“But something is shifting”, Stern adds. “The global circulation of feminist thought, digital activism, and the widespread experience of systemic betrayal – especially in political institutions – has created a hunger for language that validates what people intuit but don’t yet know how to name”.

In this context, gaslighting has emerged as “as a word that gives voice to the discomfort of being told your pain isn’t real – whether by a partner or by a government. As with many social institutions, this vocabulary can travel at first in the form of whispers, but in the end it speaks with authority”.

French sociologist Marc Joly, a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), agrees: “It is surprising to note the growing diffusion of increasingly diverse psychological concepts that allow us to define people’s mental and behavioural functioning as precisely as possible”. These concepts are increasingly used both in the private sphere – think for example of “hypersensitive” – and in the public sphere, to denounce behaviour perceived as deviant or inappropriate. Joly has devoted much of his research to the pathological narcissism that characterises political leaders such as Trump or Emmanuel Macron.

According to the sociologist, whose book La Pensée perverse au pouvoir (”Perverse thinking in power”, Anamosa, 2024) is focused on the French president, narcissistic perversion in politics reproduces the “masculine phantasm of absolute domination”. In this sense, narcissism is a reaction to a loss of relational and political power: “When minority groups or former minority groups can assert their rights and point of view, dominant groups, threatened by a loss of legitimacy, must resort to new strategies of domination.”

“What happens when the spouse maintains the possessive mentality, but no longer has the right to do so, and is faced with a partner who is willing to be autonomous and have her needs and desires respected? This imbalance in marital relations is found in all relational configurations, particularly in relations between rulers and ruled,” Joly adds. Manipulation based on denial, division, active denigration, as well as disturbing or chaotic behaviour (with consequences for society as a whole) are some of the most common manifestations of political narcissism.

A collective female experience

In her book Le gaslighting ou l’art de faire taire les femmes (”Gaslighting or the art of silencing women”, L’Observatoire-La Relève), published in 2023, French writer Hélène Frappat frames gaslighting as a “critical tool of feminism”. Frappat covers history, cinema and politics to show how this mechanism has been used against women in order to make them “disappear” and remain silent, and to make them appear crazy or unstable – from Cassandra to Antigone to Britney Spears. For Frappat, gaslighting is a collective female experience.

Rebecca Solnit appears to share this perspective: “Everything I needed to know about authoritarianism I learned from feminism, or rather from feminism’s sharp eye when it comes to coercive control and male abusers” the essayist writes. There is a common thread that connects mansplaining to gaslighting, and other mechanisms of domination that are used to silence and oppress women.

Solnit sees the same dynamic at work in international politics: Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is compared to the behaviour of an abusive ex-husband or boyfriend who turns to revenge when he cannot accept separation.

“Political gaslighting is the collective cousin of intimate betrayal”, Stern says. “While interpersonal gaslighting distorts one individual’s sense of self and truth, political gaslighting seeks to distort or re-write a population’s shared reality. It’s not just a tactic – it’s a strategy of control. The psychological mechanism is the same: deny, deflect, distort. But the reach is far broader, and the consequences more sweeping”.

When political leaders or institutions downplay atrocities, deny facts that have been clearly documented, or accuse dissidents of being “deranged”, they are not just engaging in propaganda, they are waging a war on perception, Stern argues. “The goal is destabilisation, not persuasion.” If political propaganda seeks to persuade the public, gaslighting seeks to disorient.

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Almost a decade after his first election, Trump remains a master of this strategy. “Trump is gaslighting us,” wrote Peter Wehner in The Atlantic, after leading members of the US administration mistakenly shared secret military plans with the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Instead of acknowledging the mistake, Trump attacked The Atlantic , calling it a failure.

When a gaslighter finds himself in the Oval Office, Wehner commented, “the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation”. In this context, the aim is to cause disorientation, undermine trust in institutions. As Wehner argues, “the ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilise and cohere”.

Trump is not the only leader to deploy gaslighting. In 2021, psychologist Anav Youlevich referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “master of gaslighting” for his willingness to constantly appear under attack, even when asked simple questions by journalists. Even former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his critics claim, displayed traits of a gaslighter when he discussed Brexit.

Gaslighting and post-truth

Gaslighting is closely related to another concept that has become popular in recent years: post-truth. Researcher Natascha Rietdijk links the two phenomena by noting that they each undermine both our confidence in ourselves as subjects of knowledge, as well as our epistemic autonomy (i.e. the belief that we are good judges of the trustworthiness of others).

Like gaslighting, post-truth downgrades truth to a matter of secondary importance, while appeals to emotions and personal beliefs become more relevant than the facts themselves.

Although gaslighting can affect everyone, according to Rietdijk there are groups for whom the danger is greater: “People who are marginalised in society are also more vulnerable, both because they find themselves more in such asymmetric power relations and because they might have been socialised to be less confident and more humble/self-doubting (e.g. women, the very old/very young, disabled people, ethnic minorities).” This does not mean that it is impossible for a less powerful person to gaslight a more powerful one, Rietdijk points out, but the mechanism is much less likely to work.

A power imbalance and a problematic relationship with the truth are also characteristics of political propaganda. But however subtle, there is a crucial difference between propaganda and gaslighting: “propaganda is often about mobilising a base through emotional appeal and repetition. Gaslighting erodes that base’s ability to trust its own judgment – undermining the very tools citizens use to make sense of the world,” Stern explains. In this sense, political gaslighting is a form of epistemic violence: “It creates a society in which truth is fragmented and in which individuals, uncertain of their equilibrium, become more malleable to authoritarian narratives”.

Rietdijk adds that political gaslighting, unlike propaganda, is not meant to convince or change behaviour, but to overwhelm and disorient people by making them “much less likely to act (express criticism, resist)”.

So how should one respond? Gaslighting works when the victim does not recognise it as such, Rietdijkk explains. While rebelling against gaslighting in the private sphere entails the risk of isolation, “the benefit of the political domain is that isolation is harder to achieve, and there is possibility for collective resistance and solidarity.”

For Rietdijkk, “it is important to keep calling out the gaslighting when you see it happening. Refusing to play along and speak their language is an important political strategy. It is better, and more effective, to try to start a different conversation”.

Curbing political gaslighting also means finding effective strategies to combat disinformation, notes Wehner in The Atlantic. The weapons used so far, such as fact checking and digital literacy, have yielded mixed results.

Frappat suggests irony as a weapon to turn gaslighting against those who seek to manipulate. At the end of Cukor’s film, the protagonist ironically rebels against her husband-oppressor – “if I were not mad I could have helped you” – finding joy in the same language that had been used against her. It is a dynamic similar to the re-appropriation of the word “queer” by the LGBT+ community, which has turned insult into affirmation.

Frappat calls for an irony that is “rebellious, wild, lively and sexy”, because laughter “suspends belief in all these fairy tales that have perpetuated, for millennia, the inequality of women”. And of societies as a whole.

👉 Original article on Green European Journal