Call Me Crazy: The Subtle Power of Gaslighting

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Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over, but had me believing it was always something that I'd done, sings Kimbra in Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know." In psychology, this phenomenon is called "gaslighting," a term that has its origins in a 1938 play (and a 1940 film) called Gas Light, where a man leads his wife to believe that she is insane in order to steal from her. When she notices strange events, such as the gas light dimming that occurs when he turns on the lights in the attic to search for her collection of jewels, he tells her it's just her imagination. His goal is to remove her credibility so that her complaints can be attributed to her psychosis, rather than to his misdeeds. Gaslighting is now used to refer to any attempt to make another person doubt their sense of reality.

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