Hey everybody, welcome back next time to Macon 5, a podcast where we take the questions you always wanted to ask and talk about them in a way that's easy to understand. We are your hosts, I'm Tim. And I'm Kevin. So Kevin, we're talking today about a term that is pretty common, but it's difficult to define.
The term is gaslighting. I've heard the term used plenty, but no one's ever really defined it. Can you help? Wait, Tim, you mean you forgot already the episode we did about it?
I can't believe you don't remember that one. It was a really good episode. We did an episode on it? I think I would have remembered.
Yeah, yeah, I'm just kidding. I was just trying to gaslight you right there for Germanicompet. That was gaslighting? Well, yeah, so today the term is simply defined as to make someone question their reality, which is what I was trying to do.
So it's a type of manipulation in which someone leads the victim not only to believe something, but to also distrust their own knowledge, memory, or perception, or judgment. The definition has changed over the years, but it's only really had its current definition since about the mid-2010s. Oh, so when did it originally come from then, and what did it use to mean? So gaslighting gets its name from a 1938 play, also two films, called Gaslight.
And there was first the British film version in 1940, and then American one in 1944, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, which really put it on the map. What happened in the film? So in this film, a man called Gregory convinces his wife, Paula, that she's crazy. One thing he does is to raise and lower the gaslights in their house.
And when she asks about it, he insists everything looks normal and she must be hallucinating. It was extreme to the point that he convinces his wife that she was mentally unwell, and he basically did it in order to steal from her. What do you mean he wanted to steal from her? Well, so Paula's aunt was a world-famous opera singer who was murdered at her home when she was just 14.
And her aunt had valuable jewels, which the perpetrator was after when he killed her, but was foiled when he was interrupted by the 14-year-old Paula. Now, so Gregory here employs this strategy to convince his wife that she's going mad, hoping to have her institutionalized, giving him something called power of attorney over her and allowing him to thus search unabated for the jewels. Wow, it sounds dramatic. Much more extreme than your feeble attempt at gaslighting.
So I'm glad you're not very good at it. This one seems pretty traumatic. Tell us what happened. Well, I won't tell you if he openly succeeded or not, but I will reveal the key twist that Gregory wasn't his real name.
He was in fact the original murderer of Paula's aunt. So this was all a giant elaborate ploy. In the end, it was a pretty great film. Ingrid Bergman, I think, even won an Oscar for her portrayal of Paula, and Boyer was nominated for playing a part of Gregory.
Okay, so originally gaslighting was a much more serious a phrase, as you described, than the term you used today, then. Yes, yes. And that's why when you look at the definition of gaslighting, the American Psychological Association says the term once referred to manipulation so extreme as to induce mental illness or to justify commitment of the gaslighted person to a psychiatric institution, but is now used a bit more generally. So there's kind of this distinction, at least by the APA, between its original use and the more colloquial way we use it now.
And when did the term enter popular culture as we know it in today's setting? Well, I think there's a reporter who used it in her New York Times call, I think her name was Maureen Dowd, in 1995. She was writing about the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair at the time. But I think the op-ed where she used it was in reference to the use of the technique in subjecting Newt Green Gingrich to these kind of small indignities, basically intended to provoke him to make public complaints that could come across as hysterical.
I thought it wasn't until much later than the 1990s that this term became popular. Yes, so that was the first major use. But there were only nine additional uses of the term in the times following the 20 years of the 2015. And then it really kind of took off, probably centered around a few themes.
First was its use in politics was the 2016 US presidential election. Then second was its use in a number of sexual harassment cases, like in the case of Harvey Weinstein, where powerful men would make their victims question even their own accusations. That makes total sense now. And it's helpful to understand the background so we don't misuse this term.
Yes, exactly. It's a common misused phrase. Disagreeing is not gaslighting. Having a different perspective is also not gaslighting.
Correcting someone by telling them what was actually happening is also not really gaslighting. We should really reserve gaslighting for this kind of abusive manipulation tactic used to manipulate someone and have them question their sanity and their own understanding of reality. So this is why people have confessed to crimes they didn't even commit or why people wrongly believe that they had done something wrong and are confused about it. Very interesting.
Well, we should all go check out that film now. It seems like a real thriller. Did you learn something new? If you did, send us an email.
We are at Eli5thepodcast at gmail.com. We love hearing from you, especially when you've got suggestions on topics. As always, thank you to the community at r slash explain.fm5. We will see you all next week.