Gaslighting and Narcissism - The Moral Darkness of Gaslighting (Part 3)

(This is part 3 of the article by Kate Abramson)

It’s so obvious that aiming at the obliteration of another person’s independent perspective and moral standing constitutes one of the deepest kinds of moral wrongs, that one might well wonder what else could possibly need be said about the moral wrongs of gaslighting. But there are in fact several reasons to say a good deal more. First, characterized in the way I just have, the aim of gaslighting might be satisfied by various means. If, for instance, someone kills me, I no longer have an independent perspective from which disagreement with that person might arise. That’s not what gaslighters do. Rather, they behave in distinctive ways, ways crudely characterized as forms of emotional manipulation, as the means by which they to try and destroy another’s independent perspective and moral standing. To that extent, the question of precisely what’s wrong with the aims of gaslighting is inseparable from the question of how gaslighters try to satisfy those aims. Second, and relatedly, even for all that’s been said thus far, one might still wonder whether the proposed characterization of the central aim of gaslighting is too strong. Gaslighting, one might object, is dreadful, but it is not so rare as one might expect to be the desire to obliterate another person’s perspective and independent moral standing.

I will address both of these issues in this section through a discussion that centers around the question of what gaslighting does, and does not, have in common with other kinds of wrongs the aims of which implicate another person’s independent moral standing. We might begin by noticing that the opening moves of gaslighting interactions, those that are characterized by the kinds of quips with which I began this essay, take place in a kind of netherworld between what Steve Darwall calls the second-person and third-person standpoints. As Darwall emphasizes, in being angry with someone, I take myself to have
standing to make a demand of her—say, for an apology—whether or not I express my anger. In contrast, there’s nothing about regarding someone as crazy that presupposes my authority to demand something of her. To the contrary, it would seem that insofar as I regard someone as ‘crazy’, I should regard her—in Strawsonian terms—as the object of treatment and management, rather than a member of the moral community of whom demands may be made.

Seen in this light, the fact that gaslighters frame their targets as “crazy”, “paranoid”, and “completely overreacting” is already telling, for these are ways of framing the target of gaslighting such that she cannot be a source of challenge to the gaslighter. Someone who is crazy isn’t, insofar as they are crazy, in a condition such that they can issue proper challenges to my views, and in that respect presents no threat to me even if I were unable to tolerate being challenged. But gaslighters don’t merely
think someone is crazy, paranoid or oversensitive—they say these things to the person so regarded. That’s very odd. Ask yourself: what’s the point of saying such things to the person so regarded? If I really think someone is paranoid, for instance, it would seem as a matter of both prudence and concern for that person that the last thing I should do is tell her I think she’s paranoid. People who are genuinely paranoid will only take that as further evidence in favor of their ill-founded fears.

One might suggest that such expressions can be ways of trying to get a person to rethink her reactions, or to see another perspective. But in at least three respects, that’s clearly not what’s going on in gaslighting. First, the gaslighter’s insulting, dismissive phrases are not issued in the form of invitations to reconsider or conversation, but as directives or proclamations. “Don’t be paranoid” is a command, not an invitation to discussion; “that’s crazy” is a proclamation, not a query about the foundation of someone’s views, and equally, Liz’s boss’s “I think you’re being way too sensitive . . . maybe even a little paranoid” has the form of a declaration, not a query.

Second, if one does engage with a gaslighter as though it were a conversation, they won’t engage, they’ll re-entrench. If one responds, for instance, to a gaslighter’s “that’s crazy” with “well, I’m not the only one who thinks this, so does this other person”, the gaslighter may simply retort, “well then, that person is crazy too.” Or notice how the exchanges with the two cases of the sexually harassed grad students (#6 & 8) progress. In #8 we get a progression of re-entrenching dismissals, from accusations of being oversensitive to the accusation of being insecure. In #6, the harasser first denies there’s a problem, then tries to make it the woman’s problem by grotesquely joking about how it would be better if there were no women in philosophy, and when neither of those work, resorts to calling her “prude”. And the last of these is not only a dismissal, but also a manipulative move—it’s an attempt to move the sexually harassed student by appealing to her own internalized sexism.

This brings us to a third prototypical feature of gaslighting—it works by manipulation. When insisting and re-entrenching doesn’t produce assent, the gaslighter will pull out the manipulative leverage. In the next section, I discuss in some detail the various kinds of manipulative leverage gaslighters employ. At the moment, I want to highlight simply the fact that manipulation often enters in at this stage of the gaslighting exchange—i.e. when there isn’t immediate uptake on the dismissive accusation. For instance, one common form manipulation takes in gaslighting is that of calling the exchange to an end in such a fashion as amounts to a threat or emotional goading. Consider the exchange between Pat and Collier, and Liz’s exchange with her boss. There’s Pat, utterly distressed, having just told her fiance that she feels “carved up” and “nobody”, but nevertheless has to be in charge of herself, and his response is to shut down conversation and open the newspaper. He’s trying to manipulate her by withdrawing emotional support at a crucial moment. When Liz’s boss calls the exchange to an end by recommending that she “take a few days off too destress” the manipulative threat is different, but equally clear—her job is on the line.

So, here’s what we can now say about the basic structure of a typical gaslighting interaction. First, the target is framed in the mind of the gaslighter as crazy, paranoid, overreacting or oversensitive—framed in such a way, that is, that she cannot be the source of genuine disagreement. Then the gaslighter tells her this is how he sees her, in the form of a proclamation—e.g. “that’s crazy”—or a command—e.g. “don’t be paranoid”. Then s/he insists on the dismissive framing in their interactions; re-entrenching or using other terms of dismissal if she resists. And finally (though often this is going on throughout), the gaslighter manipulates his target—perhaps, like Liz’s boss by making it clear that her job is on the line, or perhaps like Collier by attempting to manipulate his loved one’s desire for comfort at a difficult time by withdrawing. Once these features of gaslighting interactions are laid bare, it no longer strikes me as too sharp to say that the gaslighter’s characteristic desire is
to destroy the possibility of disagreement, where the only sure path to that is destroying the source of possible disagreement—the independent, separate, deliberative perspective from which disagreement might arise.

Thus understood, gaslighting does share certain key features with other forms of manipulation and other kinds of wrongs. But even insofar as we can aptly characterize it under the rubric of one of those other, more widely discussed, categories, it is a peculiar moral violation. Consider, for instance, what we might say about gaslighting as a species of manipulation. Stephen Darwall characterizes some forms of manipulation as: . . . purport[ing] to create reasons in something like the way that legitimate claims or demands do, that is, second-personally, but without the appropriate normative backing for the threatened “sanctions”, which consequently provide only the superficial appearance of an accountability relation. [ . . . ] Indeed, it is not unusual for threats or other forms of coercion or manipulation to be accompanied by self-indulging rationalizing fantasies of justified authority. Tyrants and batterers frequently comfort themselves by imagining the righteousness of their cause.

Likewise, when the gaslighter says “that’s crazy”, he isn’t in the first instance claiming for himself a epistemic authority (I see this rightly, you don’t). Rather, what he’s doing is issuing a demand that one see things his way. It’s a demand because it works that that way—this isn’t a case of, for instance, testimonial credence (i.e. the gaslighter isn’t asking his/her target to take it on testimony that it’s true that “that’s crazy”). If that were the scenario, there’d be no explanation for the gaslighter’s use of manipulative threats (implicit or explicit). It’s the explicit or implicit manipulative threats behind “that’s crazy” that give the target anything like motive for assent. And just as with the kinds of manipulation Darwall mentions, there are rationalizing fantasies of justified authority at play in gaslighting. Indeed, here we can see another role that calling someone “crazy” or
“paranoid” plays in gaslighting—such claims enable a rationalizing fantasy that the target is not in a condition to make judgments for herself—she’s paranoid, crazy, oversensitive; her basic rational capacities have escaped her, so she really
needs to substitute his judgment for hers.

But the rationalizing fantasies are exactly that. What is being expressed is a deep interpersonal need for assent, an intolerance for being challenged, and the desire to destroy the very possibility of disagreement, all of which are taking the form of a manipulative demand.

On the other hand, the content of the gaslighter’s aim makes this much worse than most forms of manipulation. Suppose, for the moment, we follow the usual Kantian account of what’s wrong with manipulative conduct. Then we might say this: while it’s a violation of recognition respect to guilt-trip me into going somewhere with you (because, e.g. you are thereby causing me to act for reasons which I cannot rationally endorse), there’s nothing wrong with asking me to do so—the aim of having me go somewhere with you is permissible.

In Kantian terms, there are permissible maxims of action with that aim. Even supposing that ordinary manipulation is wrong, and for this reason, there’s an important difference between that kind of failure of recognition respect, and the kind of failure that’s at issue in gaslighting. We might put the difference this way: the gaslighter’s aim is impermissible no matter under what maxim of action it is pursued: it is to aim at producing a situation in which, one way or another, that person does not occupy a standpoint from which challenges might be issued. That aim, in and of itself, involves a profound violation of recognition respect.

It aims to work not only in a way to which a person could not rationally consent (like ordinary manipulation), but to make it the case that consent is no longer an issue because the individual is no longer in a position to either offer or withhold
consent.

So too, in Kantian terms, gaslighting is even worse than contempt. The problem with contempt, according to Kantians, is that it involves regarding a person as though she were outside the moral community. Gaslighting attempts to make it the case
that a person is in fact no longer properly regarded as a full member of the moral community, because she doesn’t in fact have that independent standing. Moreover, because of the ways in which gaslighting works through manipulation, the destruction of the target’s independent perspective is brought about, after a fashion, through her own complicity. If I’m manipulated into going along with something by a simple act of deception, I may feel embarrassed for having believed that person, but I won’t typically feel I’ve been complicit in having been so duped. Gaslighting, in contrast, is accomplished through manipulative means that leave its target sensing (rightly so) that she has been turned against herself. In this way, gaslighting has several important elements in common with what David Sussman argues is paradigmatic of torture.

Torture, like gaslighting, aims at the destruction of another’s sense of self. But what’s specially awful about torture, on Sussman’s account, is that in torture, a victim’s will is turned against itself; she is made to believe that at every moment there is something she could do to stop it, to escape, and that becomes itself part of the torture. Similarly, gaslighted women have not only their wills, but their affective dispositions and even sometimes their character turned against them for their own destruction. Liz’s devotion to her career, for instance, has been turned into a threat used to destabilize her own sense of being unjustly treated at work; Collier is trying to use Pat’s love for him to get her to turn against her own independent interests; the guys who are urging the junior colleague who’d been slapped on the butt to “have some sympathy” are trying to get her to turn her sympathetic capacities against her own proper sense of dignity.

Consider too the ways in which the phrase “that’s crazy” (as opposed, to “you’re crazy”) can be deployed in gaslighting efforts. The phrase, “that’s crazy” gives the appearance of an escape, an out, for the target: if only she agrees that it is ‘crazy’ to think x, it seems, then she can escape the charge that she herself is crazy. But this is merely an appearance: to the extent what is going on is gaslighting, acceding to the claim “that’s crazy” will instead only confirm the gaslighter’s view that the person is crazy.

Part of the moral horror of gaslighting is that it makes one complicit in one’s own destruction in these ways. Similarly, the wrongs of gaslighting also go far beyond what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice”. Testimonial injustice, on Fricker’s account, occurs when a “speaker receives a credibility deficit owing to an identity prejudice in the
speaker”. Yes, the gaslighter gives his target’s testimony no credibility—she’s crazy. But it would be more accurate to say that gaslighting puts questions of credibility deficits and excesses off the table entirely. To suppose that in gaslighting, the primary issue is about credibility assessments is, I think, to focus in the wrong place. It’s to lose sight of the fact that an important part of what’s going on is that the gaslighter is trying turn a situation that might involve credibility assessments into a situation in which credibility assessments are not at issue, because there is no credibility to be assessed, no other perspective in the offing, and so no possibility of disagreement.

One final category of wrong deserves also deserves mention in this context: that of silencing. In Rae Langton’s well-known work on the subject, she describes the central notion at issue here thus: one speaks, one utters words, and fails not simply to achieve the effect one aims at, but fails to perform the very action one intends. Here speech misfires, and the act is unhappy in the way Austin described: although the appropriate words are uttered, with the appropriate intention, the speaker fails to perform the intended illocutionary act. Silencing of this . . . kind we can call illocutionary disablement. . .

Example (1)
Warning
[drawn from Donald Davidson]
Imagine this: the actor is acting in a scene in which there is supposed to be a fire . . .
“Fire!” he screams . . .
And now a real fire breaks out, and the actor tries in vein to warn the real audience.
“Fire!” he screams.

“Something about the role he occupies”, Langton says of the actor-warning case, “prevents his utterance from counting as a warning”. It’s not hard to see in what way(s) gaslighting involves silencing in this sense. At the most rudimentary level, the target is unable to issue challenges to the gaslighter’s desires/views, because none are taken by the gaslighter as such: that is the role she occupies for him. She says “this is discriminatory”, and there is no way for that to count as a challenge to the view that x is not discriminatory, for its force (for the gaslighter) is merely that of a crazy, paranoid, or oversensitive rant. But it’s not only at this level that gaslighting is ‘silencing’ in Langton’s sense. Insofar as the target of gaslighting is regarded as crazy, it’s not merely particular utterances that will fail to have what would otherwise be their illocutionary force, but anything she
says. And insofar as gaslighting is actually successful, it undermines the target’s ability to take her own words, thoughts, reactions or views as having the force they otherwise would. She may be angry, or if she can no longer muster that, hurt in response to a discriminatory act, but she will not be able to take her own reactions seriously herself —to treat those attitudes, herself, in any of the myriad of ways in which it is appropriate to treat anyone’s reactive attitudes.

Successful gaslighting, in this way, involves what might be aptly thought of as a kind of
existential silencing. One might then say that the aims of gaslighting make it a form of manipulation, and a deep failure of recognition respect, and torture, and epistemic injustice and silencing. It is, indeed, each of these. Yet as we’ve seen, it involves a particular form of each of these other kinds of wrongs, and to fully capture the immorality of what it is at which gaslighters aim, it won’t do to simply choose one of these categories. Each provides an important piece of the horrifying puzzle.

One might want to object that such strong characterizations of what’s wrong with the characteristic aims of gaslighting don’t seem to take into account my earlier point that the scope of a given gaslighter’s intolerance for disagreement can be quite limited. For instance, in many of my examples, to the extent there’s such a destructive intolerance for disagreement at issue, it’s restricted in scope to intolerance for being challenged about ‘whether there’s discrimination going on’ or even more specifically ‘what qualifies as sexual harassment’. These gaslighters, one might suggest, are aiming to destroy the possibility of disagreement just about those matters. And, so the argument would go, even if they succeed in undermining their targets sense of having standing to judge or react on those questions, successful gaslighting that’s limited in scope in this way isn’t enough to drive anyone to lose their sense of standing as an independent deliberator and moral agent altogether.

On the one hand, there’s something right about this: people can and do withstand a great deal of gaslighting before they reach the point that’s been at work in the background of my remarks. But it’s important not to minimize. First, even insofar as the scope of gaslighting efforts remains confined to something like “what qualifies as sexual harassment”, we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t retain a sense of the importance of what’s at stake in these examples—a sense of one’s integrity as a sexual being, one’s identity as a co-worker among equals, one’s identity as a philosopher. The scope of gaslighting efforts may be limited, but in these cases, they concern core aspects of individuals’ self-conceptions.

Second, even in ordinary, mundane cases of a loss of self-confidence, that loss can spread like an infection to other arenas of one’s life; in gaslighting, where the loss of self-confidence can be extreme (commensurate with the destructive aims of gaslighting) and the target arena involves core aspects of an individual’s self-conception, it is to be expected that this infection will often spread.

Third, as I said in the beginning, it’s important not to forget that where gaslighting is going on, it’s often pervasive. This is rarely one exchange about bra sizes; it’s part of the warp and weft of too many women’s everyday experiences.