Book Review: ‘On Gaslighting,’ by Kate Abramson

Yes, writes Abramson, gaslighters weaponize love and trust to inflict psychological damage. But gaslighters are not often aware that they are gaslighting. Gaslighting takes place over time. Gaslighting often involves intimate relationships — spouses are the blueprint, but “it’s depressingly common among abusive parents as well,” she writes, “both as a form of abuse and as a way of covering up other forms of abuse (by gaslighting those who protest against it).”

Gaslighting can be deployed in the workplace and in scenarios in which the target belongs to a marginalized group. Gaslighting “is a fiendishly brilliant tool for reinforcing racism, sexism and other forms of systematic subjugation,” she explains. Consider a boss who minimizes an incident of harassment or discrimination. Yet Abramson is adamant in pushing back against the idea of “structural gaslighting.”

While social structure can certainly be a tool in a gaslighter’s arsenal, she writes, it is “a fundamentally very different phenomenon from the features of oppressive social structures.” Prejudice can be harmful without an individual taking any specific action for the harm to occur, she explains, “let alone engage in the kinds of grotesque manipulations over extended periods of time that are characteristic means of gaslighting.” And so we learn that, according to these rules, social structures don’t gaslight — people do.

Like its spiritual forebear, Harry G. Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit,” Abramson’s close examination of a phenomenon is a helpful and enlightening, if dense and academic, effort. It’s made slightly more accessible by her inclusion of pop culture references (stills from the Hepburn-Tracy film “Pat and Mike”; dialogue from the sitcom “New Girl”; Dolly Parton lyrics) and real-life anecdotes about microaggressions at work or hostility on social media.

Yet after absorbing the gruesome particulars of gaslighting, a reader may not be much heartened by the book’s brief final section, in which Abramson addresses regaining trust after experiencing gaslighting.

She notes that “the appropriate companions in the difficult work of traversing that road are therapists and friends, not philosophers.” Still, she writes, being articulate about the nature of an experience is significant to working through it, and gaslighting is no different. “In that light,” she writes, “it might not be the worst idea to take a little philosophy on the road with you too.”

ON GASLIGHTING | By Kate Abramson | Princeton University Press | 219 pp. | $24.95