| Inhalt |
Everyone speaks about gaslighting today. As we know from an array of therapists and coaches, often landed on TikTok and Instragam as well, but also political journalists and feminist or antiracist social critics, gaslighting is a pernicious form of manipulation in which one person (the gaslighter) drives another (the gaslightee) to doubt themselves, their own psychological reality, the validity of their emotions, for the gaslighter’s own advantages. The consequences on the gaslightee can range from affective distress, depression or even madness. In its most common form, gaslighting happens in romantic relationships, where the gaslighter is often a man and the gaslightee a woman. But gaslighting occurs also in friendships, between parents and children, on the work place, in relationships skewed by racist discrimination, and on a political level (one of the first introducing the term in the political arena is Lauren Duca, in her now famous piece “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”, 2016).
What exactly constitutes gaslighting and how it works, however, remain far from clear. What is the specificity of gaslighting vis-à-vis more encompassing categories, like manipulation and power? Is gaslighting always conscious and intentional? Does it happen in interpersonal relationships only, or is there also something like “structural” or “cultural” gaslighting? The aim of the seminar is to shed light on the phenomenon with the help of philosophical, conceptual tools. Gaslighting seems, as a matter of fact, not only a useful category for therapeutic settings (as it has been at the beginning, especially thanks to Robin Stern’s 2007 bestseller The Gaslighting Effect) and a subject-matter for public debates. In recent years, it has also been at the centre of heated debates in academic philosophy, especially in the field of political epistemology, feminist theory and the philosophy of emotions, around questions of epistemic violence and injustice.
In the seminar, we read and discuss the most authoritative contributions to the debate, in particular Kate Abramson’s book On Gaslighting (2024). We will also watch and discuss George Cukor’s movie Gaslight (1944), to which we originally owe the term. |
| Literatur |
Kate Abramson, On Gaslighting, Princeton, Princeton University Press 2024
George Cukor, Gaslight, 1944
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