Gaslighting

Two operations run together, and the definition names both. Universal reality is denied, and guilt is reversed, which means the target is told that what happened did not happen and that they are responsible for it. Marsh treats the second as primary. Gaslighting is the method by which a predator deflects their own guilt onto their victims, typically through a counter accusation, and she points out that the film the word comes from works exactly this way, since the wife rightly accused her husband of trying to be rid of her and he counter accused her of being insane. The accusation of madness is not incidental. Under the law of authority, anyone opposing authoritative endoreality is declared criminal or insane, so calling the accuser mad is the standard instrument rather than a personal cruelty. The pattern appears at several scales in her account. In an intimate relationship it follows a surge of overwhelming positive attention offered when a victim is about to leave, irresistibly healing to someone left raw and depleted, and is followed by increased stress, accidents, humiliation, betrayal and guilt reversal. In its most complete form a reflector takes the endo-ideal role, assumes their idol's identity, credits themselves with that idol's attributes and accomplishments and then casts the idol as the negative image saddled with all their own guilt. Religion supplies the version operating on a whole population.

The term comes from the 1938 play Gas Light and its film adaptations, and entered clinical usage through psychoanalytic writing before spreading widely. Psychology now treats it as a form of coercive control, studied alongside intimate partner abuse, and Kate Abramson and other philosophers have analysed it as an attack on a person's standing as a knower rather than merely on their beliefs. Sociologist Paige Sweet argued that gaslighting depends on existing inequalities to be effective. Marsh converges with the epistemic reading and grounds it differently, since in her account the denial of reality is in the service of guilt transfer rather than being the objective, which predicts that gaslighting will always accompany an unbalanced interaction rather than appearing as free-standing cruelty.