Gaslighting and Narcissism Part 2 (The Aims of Gaslighting)

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

The Aims of Gaslighting

When gaslighting first became a technical term in psychoanalysis, it was
understood as a process of projective identification.

Here’s the general idea.

The gaslighter feels something with which he is uncomfortable, and unable to acknowledge. So he attributes it to someone else. So far, all we have is projection, as when someone with unacknowledged anger starts fearfully wondering if others are angry with him. Or consider the familiar case of the person who has a crush he cannot acknowledge, and so believes that the object of his crush has a crush on him. It becomes projective identification when the projector needs the other person to play along, and she obliges—in psychological terms, she introjects. One common example goes: He feels anxious about his abilities, cannot tolerate the anxiety, and so does his best to expel that anxiety by producing it in someone else. If it works, what he gets is roughly “I’m not anxious, you are”. Of course, he’s made that the case by acting so as to produce anxiety in the other person. There is, I’ll contend, something right about this kind of analysis of gaslighting, namely, the thought that successful gaslighting involves the gaslighter’s creating conditions such that his/her own deep anxieties are relieved by the successful gaslighting. But ‘projective identification’ doesn’t seem quite the right terms in which to understand gaslighting. Canonical cases of projective identi- fication involve one person projecting onto another something about themselves that they cannot accept, and the second person then ‘introjecting’—taking on, or adopting, even if only temporarily—that which has been projected onto them.

Many even relatively ordinary cases of gaslighting don’t quite fit that picture. Consider, for instance, the following scenes from the movie:

Pat and Mike

Pat is an expert golfer engaged to a man, Collier, who would rather she abandon her serious full-time career aspirations, marry him, and devote herself to wifely endeavors. That she doesn’t want this for her own life threatens his personal sense of manhood. So he defensively forms ‘worries’ about her golfing abilities, and frequently expresses these ‘worries’ to Pat. Pat perseveres, reaches the championship. She’s winning. Until the final round. Then, Collier shows up, and makes faces of ‘concern’. Confidence shaken, it all comes down to the last hole. Right before taking what should have been her final, easy shot, Pat looks up to see Collier’s ‘worried’ face. She loses.

Afterwards, the two have the following exchange on the train:
Collier : How about looking on the bright side of this for instance? Take this—As long as your job’s out of the way, move the date up, tie the old knot? I think you’ve done enough, worked long enough, don’t you?
Pat (distressed): oh, too much (looks down)
Collier (interrupting Pat): After all, what you trying to prove, who you trying to lick?
Pat (determinedly, upset): Myself.
(pounds fist in air)
Collier: Just the kid who’ll do it
(Puts his leg up and looks at her dubiously and patronizingly)
Pat: Collier, do you sort of, I don’t think you mean to, but do you think of me as just the little woman?
Collier: That’s right, and myself as a little man.
(Squeezes her shoulders like a small child).
Pat (quite distressed): Right now, now I feel like a sort of flop that you’re rescuing. I’m flummoxed, that’s what I am. Maybe we ought to wait until I don’t feel so carved up, so nobody.
Collier: Why don’t you just let me take charge!
Pat (fatigued): I have to be in charge of myself.
Collier: Oh what’s the good of that, I mean after all?
Pat: I have to have time to think it over.
Collier: Well, just make sure you don’t think it under. It’s a nice long ride, just take your time.
(Opens newspaper to end conversation).

Now we’ve got a case that’s pretty clearly in the territory of gaslighting. Yet it’s difficult to read as an instance of ‘projective identification’: it’s not obvious that there is anything about himself of which Collier is trying to rid himself by ‘relocating’ it in Pat. There’s some kind of defensive maneuver in play—Collier’s ‘worries’ that Pat cannot succeed as a golfer are a defensive cover for his own desire that she want something for her own life that he does not. But it’s not the fact that there is such a defensive maneuver in play, much less anything about the particular kind of defensive maneuver in play that makes this recognizable as an instance of gaslighting. It’s recognizable as gaslighting because Collier is so clearly trying to radically undermine Pat, and doing so through a combination of dismissing (e.g. ‘oh what’s the good of that, I mean after all’) and manipulating her(esp. via her trust and love).

Notably, moreover, the sense in which Pat ends up undermined isn’t just about her golfing abilities—she says she feels “carved up”, “nobody”. This kind of language is common among targets of successful gaslighting. It’s in the same category, for instance, as De Beauvoir’s “I am no longer sure . . .even if I think at all." It’s language that speaks to a sense of having lost one’s independent standing as deliberator and moral agent. And, significantly, it’s language that mirrors the canonical language of gaslighters. That is, gaslighters charge their targets with being crazy, oversensitive, paranoid. What these terms have in common in the context of gaslighting is that they are ways of charging someone not simply with being wrong or mistaken, but being in no condition to judge whether she is wrong or mistaken. The accusations are about the target’s basic rational competence— her ability to get facts right, to deliberate, her basic evaluative competencies and ability to react appropriately: her independent standing as deliberator and moral agent. When gaslighting succeeds, it drives its targets crazy in the sense of deeply undermining just these aspects of a person’s independent standing. So is that what gaslighters want—to undermine their target’s independent standing as deliberators and moral agents? Is that their aim? This is tricky territory. To begin with, we’re talking about motives that are typically obscure to the gaslighter himself/herself, so when we talk about the gaslighter’s “aims” or “desires”, we’re often not in the territory of explicit features of conscious deliberation, but rather speaking of what will in some sense satisfy the gaslighter.

Second, in this sense of having an “aim”, every individual gaslighter typically has multiple aims. This is true not only in the jejune sense that all people have multiple aims, but also in a sense that is directly relevant to their gaslighting— gaslighting activities nearly always serve multiple aims for the gaslighter. It’s helpful in this light to think about some rough categories into which we might sort the various aims or desires commonly implicated in gaslighting. In one category, closest to the psychological surface (though commonly not conscious) are what we might call the gaslighter’s specific aims or desires—the aims the gaslighter has with regard to that particular interaction (or series of interactions) with that particular target. For instance, in this category we could place Collier’s desire that Pat abandon her career for the sake of pursuing exclusively wifely
projects. In the same category belongs Sartre’s desire to have De Beauvoir’s sit admiringly and in awe at his feet, and Liz’s boss’s desire to see himself as judicious and kind.

Such specific desires or aims often differ from what we might call a gaslighter’s basic or underlying desires. For instance, we might not implausibly suppose that Collier’s most basic desire is to be the exclusive object of someone else’s attention and affection. Sartre might equally plausibly be seen as driven by a need to have others prop up his fragile ego. Liz’s boss (insofar as we encounter him) seems driven simply by a desire to dominate and/or maintain existing power structures. These are morally dark underlying aims. But that needn’t be the case: some such underlying motives may not be, when considered in isolation, the least bit morally unsavory. Someone who insists that sexual harassment be treated as merely a minor annoyance might at root be driven by a need to see the world they inhabit as basically agreeable and kind. Similarly, someone might want to see what is in fact discriminatory conduct as excusable because they have a deep need to look up to authority figures. Or they might be driven by a need to maintain harmony (or its appearance), or avoid conflict. Furthermore, there’s no reason to suppose that any individual gaslighter has only one basic or underlying motive. His or her underlying motives might, for instance, be some psychologically undistinguished combination of a desire for harmony, a desire to look up to authority figures, and a desire to preserve existing power structures.

And yet, these very points allow us to see something else that’s crucial about gaslighting. None of the specific or underlying desires I’ve just mentioned need depend for its satisfaction on gaslighting someone. If, for instance, Liz’s boss ultimately wants to maintain existing power structures and see himself as judicious and kind, why doesn’t he just ignore Liz? Or, short of that, simply end his meeting with her with what we are told are his plausible explanations for his misconduct towards her, rather than go on to suggest that she’s being oversensitive and should take a few days off to de-stress? Similarly, if what’s
motivating the fellows in conversation with the junior colleague who was slapped on the butt is that they want to minimize the harm of sexual harassment (the specific aim) because they are driven by a desire to want to look up to authority figures (the underlying aim), why not just dismiss the incident with something as simple as the phrase “I don’t see it that way”? Why, instead, call upon her to have sympathy for her harasser; why insist she’s being “oversensitive”? If Collier wants to be the exclusive object of someone’s attention and affection, why radically undermine Pat’s career ambitions, rather than finding someone who doesn’t have any such independent ambitions? Or consider, finally, the person deeply motivated by a desire for harmony. While successfully gaslighting someone who objects to injustice produces some sort of harmony, there’s hardly
a necessary or even obvious connection between having a desire for harmony and being motivated to gaslight dissenters. Why, to begin with, see she who objects to injustice as the person who has disrupted harmony, rather than they who have
perpetrated the injustice in the first place? Even insofar as one focuses on the objector, why configure ‘harmony’ as something requires her total silencing (in the manner of gaslighting) rather than simply ignoring, or even appeasing her (either in addition to, or as opposed to the perpetrators of injustice)?

Something more has to be going on in the psychology of gaslighters to explain their behavior. What makes the difference between the fellow who ignores or dismisses evidence that his desires cannot be satisfied, and the one who gaslights is the inability to tolerate even the possibility of challenge. One clinical psychiatrist who works and writes on the subject puts it this way, “A gaslighter. . . can’t tolerate the slightest challenge to the way he sees things. However he decides to explain the world to himself, that’s how you must see it, too—or leave him prey to unbearable anxiety.”

Here too there are variations on this basic theme. First, there can be variations in the scope of the intolerance for disagreement. Any given gaslighter, that is, might be able to tolerate challenges to some aspects of his views (say, literature or restaurant quality) but not others (say, what qualifies as sexual harassment or discrimination). And he might be able to tolerate disagreement from some people (say, male authority figures or strangers) but not others (say, women or junior colleagues).

But it is this intolerance and intense anxiety about the very possibility of disagreement that explains why gaslighters behave as they do: they seek to eliminate that very possibility.

Furthermore, this characteristic aim of gaslighting is interpersonal in the sense that it is a need gaslighters have of
and directed towards particular persons. Again: these are not the guys who roll their eyes and walk away when a woman
points out that something is sexist. These are the guys who turn to that woman, insist that she’s crazy, and insist that she
assent in some way to the proposition that she’s crazy. They don’t just need the world to appear to themselves to be
a certain way—they need you, the target, to see it that way. But you don’t. He needs this to be ‘just some poor old guy’ he can admire, rather than a sexual harasser. You point out the sexual harassment. And precisely because what the gaslighter cannot tolerate the “slightest challenge to the way he sees things” he needs the challenge you’ve just presented to completely disappear as a challenge.

The only way for that to actually happen is for you not to have the standing to issue challenges, and to not see yourself as having that standing.

The central desire or aim of the gaslighter, to put it sharply, is to destroy even the possibility of disagreement—to have his sense of the world not merely confirmed, but placed beyond dispute. And the only sure way to accomplish this is for there to be no source of possible disagreement—no independent, separate, deliberative perspective from which disagreement might arise. So he gaslights: he aims to destroy the possibility of disagreement by so radically undermining another person that she has nowhere left to stand from which to disagree, no standpoint from which her words might constitute genuine disagreement.

If we set this as the paradigm case of a gaslighting aim, gaslighting aims will then, and to that extent, belong to a particular family of dismissive interactions characterized as a family insofar as the parties to them fail to treat disagreements as seriously as they ought to be treated, for reasons having to do with psychologically difficulties the parties have in dealing with disagreements.

And some close cousins in this family may be difficult to distinguish in situ from gaslighters. There are those, for instance, who need their vision of the world socially confirmed by most, but not all. For this person, it will be enough if everyone else
thinks the woman who is pointing to sexism is crazy. She won’t then have social standing to dispute his views, in the ordinary sense that no one will take her challenges seriously. Notice, however, that for a person so motivated, there doesn’t seem to be any motive for engaging with the person who objects to sexism. Indeed, if the aim is that everyone else think she is ‘crazy’, it may be tactically better not to speak to she who objects, but only about her.

The gaslighter is different because he wants and needs more than that—he wants it to actually be the case
that she cannot issue genuine challenges to him

The only way to accomplish that is to gaslight her—to try and make it the case that she’s left with no independent standpoint from which to issue a challenge. What he gets, and his cousin doesn’t, is that he gets to be right. This, in my view, is the core insight of early psychoanalytic attempts to understand gaslighting in terms of projective identification, for what projective identification creates at the most general level is a situation in which one person’s anxieties and needs are relieved by making external reality fit the contours of those anxieties/needs. Merely creating a situation in which everyone regards
a woman as unhinged, without actually unhinging her, doesn’t accomplish that. One might well worry that this characterization of the gaslighter is too strong. One respect in which my characterization may seem too sharp by half has
to do with how we think about the relationship between the examples with which I began, and the destructive aims I’ve claimed are characteristic of gaslighting.

If we think of the paradigm case of gaslighting as one in which the gaslighter wholeheartedly, constantly and consistently aims at the destruction his or her target’s standing to issue challenges, it may be less than entirely clear that all of the examples with which I began are examples of gaslighting. This appearance is partly mitigated by remembering that these are vignettes in the lives of women for whom, as a rule of thumb, this sort of interaction has become pervasive. A single instance of one person saying to another, “that’s crazy” may not appear—may not be —an instance of someone trying to destroy another’s standing to make claims. But when that form of interaction is iterated over and over again, when counterevidence to “that’s crazy” is dismissed, when nothing is treated as salient evidence for the possibility of disrupting the initial accusation, appearances shift.

Equally importantly, we also need to bear in mind that gaslighters—like the rest of us—commonly have conflicting aims/desires. We’ve already seen that this can be true even internal to the aims/desires that motivate gaslighters. I’ve characterized Sartre’s specific aim, for example, as wanting De Beauvoir to sit in awe of him at his feet. Satisfaction of hisgaslighting desire to destroy De Beauvoir’s independent standing, both would and would not support this more specific aim. On the one hand, the more De Beauvoir’s own sense of her philosophical abilities is undermined, the more likely she is to sit in awe of Sartre at his feet. On the other hand, if she really came to consistently doubt whether she can “think at
all”, De Beauvoir would be so undermined that she wouldn’t have enough sense of her own acumen left to be in awe of Sartre’s abilities. A similar tension seems to hold between the general and the specific aims of the gaslighters involved in some of the other cases—e.g. the case of Pat and Collier.

One might, in this light, try and amend my descriptions of the aims of gaslighting so we can make a consistent whole out of the gaslighter’s desires. Perhaps, one might suggest, the gaslighter typically wants to undermine his target not to the point where she loses the ability to challenge altogether, but just to the point where he gets other things he wants—a woman devoted exclusively to wifely endeavors, a female philosopher sitting in awe at his feet, a colleague willing to treat discriminatory conduct as though it were an exercise of justified authority.

But the conflicted picture of the gaslighter strikes me as closer to the truth, at least in most cases, than the proposed ‘reconciled’ picture of the gaslighter’s aims. For one thing, attempting to reconcile at a philosopher’s distance the otherwise apparently conflicting aims of the typical gaslighter problematically glosses over their destructive impulse and “unbearable anxiety” at the possibility of challenge that underwrites that impulse. By the same token, however, there is more
than simply such a destructive impulse at work in most of these cases. Most gaslighters are not great evil-doing caricatures of the sort is Gregory (he is, after all, a movie character). To the contrary, people who engage in gaslighting often also want to maintain a relationship, sometimes even a close relationship, with their targets (CURATOR'S NOTE: This relationship is specific to Narcissistic Personality Disorder).

Indeed, the gaslighter’s demands for assent are often simultaneously expressions of the destructive desire [‘be crazy so I don’t have to view this as an arena in which I might be challenged’] and, at the same time, expressions of a desire to maintain relations with their targets [‘just agree with me about this, so we can get on with our relationship’]. Think, for instance, of the urgency with which— immediately after her loss in the golf tournament—Collier tries to get Pat to agree marry him. He wants her undermined so that she will “just let him take charge!” but he also desperately wants her to assent—even want—to marry him (and so to have stable enough desires and will to do so). An apt description of the case, it seems to me, will simply let the tension in his motives stand as it is. Yet for all of these complexities, it remains the destructive impulse that distinguishes the gaslighter’s aim as the aims of a gaslighter: it’s the intense anxiety and fear about challenge, the need to destroy that possibility that drives him to gaslighting. And I think the basic structure at issue in my characterization of these core destructive aims of gaslighting—an interpersonal need for assent, intolerance for challenge or even the possibility of being challenged, and the manipulative destruction of the gaslightee’s standing to issue challenge—can all be read fairly straightforwardly off the typical form or pattern of gaslighters’ interactions with their targets. To see this clearly, however, we also need to begin to think about what’s wrong with gaslighting.