“Stunned” and “delighted” are two of the ways the popular reception of her latest book, “On Gaslighting”, make Kate Abramson feel.
On Gaslighting has earned favorable reviews from the New York Times, who called it “helpful and enlightening,” the New Yorker, National Public Radio, numerous other media, as well as quick translations into three special editions. Abramson, the Mahlon Powell Associate Professor of Philosophy within the College of Arts of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, was surprised by the wide interest in her book, because “I’ve spent much of my academic career writing about eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume,” she noted.
In her book, “I look at various aspects of gaslighting, its fundamental structure, its moral implications, and its relationship to certain kinds of political structures,” she explained. The final chapter explores what we can learn about the structure of interpersonal trust, Abramson pointed out, “From seeing the ways in which it’s manipulated, and goes awry in gaslighting.”
Gaslighting often occurs in intimate relationships, but it may also, for example, involve parents or happen in the workplace. Gaslighters, she writes, “aim to fundamentally undermine their targets as deliberators and moral agents,” turning individuals on the receiving end of gaslighting against themselves. That is, gaslighters not only try to make their targets think they’re crazy, they’re “actually trying to drive [them] crazy.”
Abramson wrote On Gaslighting for several reasons. “First, in 2014 I published an article on the topic that garnered a surprising amount of pickup, and subsequently I was contacted by people to write a book,” she said. “And I realized there was no sustained philosophical examination about gaslighting, and I thought this is something that’s important to get a grip on: what is it exactly that we’re looking at when we’re looking at this phenomena?”
Abramson worked on the book after the 2016 presidential election cycle as gaslighting went from an obscure term to one that started appearing regularly in in the media, and on social media. “Everyone from every end of the political spectrum began using it. As I remark in the preface to the book, one of the things that happens when a term becomes popularized in this way is that just what it’s referring to starts to become unclear.”
With a negative term like gaslighting, “We confront something known as ‘concept creep’ or ‘semantic bleaching.’ That is, the risk is that term about a particular phenomenon becomes an overused, negative tag line that gets added to anything. Any time you want to say something negative about the way somebody’s in interacting with you, you say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me.’”
Abramson was troubled by this. “Gaslighting picks out a really important interpersonal phenomena and obscuring what it’s picking out isn’t helpful for anyone,” she said. “I decided to write a book and think through very carefully exactly what the interpersonal structure is of gaslighting.”
Another sociological phenomenon that led to the popularization of the term was the MeToo movement. “With MeToo, this huge wave of women were sharing their stories and testimony about how they were put into a position where they were gaslighted by someone, and how difficult it was to recognize what was going on.”
In too many cases, Abramson said, “The response to someone being sexually harassed is to minimize: ‘It’s not that big a deal. Why are you making such a fuss?’ And worse, gaslighting involves literally trying to undermine someone who’s been wronged, to compromise their ability to think through what’s happened to them.”
A similar phenomenon with the term gaslighting is its weaponization. “When a term gets weaponized, in starts to lose its depth, then you lose track of what gaslighting actually involves. Likewise, if you’re calling everything gaslighting, it loses its meaning. There’s a social phenomenon wherein people are searching for words like gaslighting that sometimes are apt and sometimes aren’t for what they’re trying to describe. But there’s a real interpersonal phenomenon in the world that’s aptly called gaslighting.”
Gaslighting, she writes, is deployed “as a form of abuse and as a way of covering up other forms of abuse (by gaslighting those who protest against it).”
In writing On Gaslighting, Abramson wanted to write a book utilizing her skills as a philosopher, free of jargon and technical terms, “So if somebody who’s not a philosopher wants to sit down and work through it, they can,” she explained.
Abramson recalled Miranda Fricker, a philosopher who wrote a book called Epistemic Injustice. “Fricker described the experience of women in the 1970s when they first encountered the phrase ‘sexual harassment,’ a term that didn’t get exist before then. That is, it provided a concept so that women could accurately name an experience, that they could draw a circle around but couldn’t properly name before.”
In a similar vein, Abramson is “stunned” at the book’s reception and positive reviews. “I think of myself as somebody who’s just trying to say true things. That’s my goal as a philosopher.”
Abramson is also “delighted,” she said, “Because it shows the power of philosophy as embraced by a wide range of audiences. People are hungry for it.”