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Gaslighting The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Robin Stern, New York: Harmony Books, 2018, 271 pp.
Gaslighting as a term had been around since the 1960s but came into vogue when Donald Trump announced for President. A gaslighter seeks to manipulate another or others into thinking that their own perceptions of reality are mistaken, and for the gaslightee to believe what the manipulator claims instead. It owes its origins to a 1938 British play, Gaslight, by Patrick Hamilton that in 1944 became an American movie. It starred Charles Boyer as a husband who deceives his wife, Ingrid Bergman, and manipulates her into thinking that she is mistaken about events and occurrences. He wants her to doubt her sanity as part of his desire to manipulate his spouse to get her inheritance. A police inspector played by Joseph Cotton suspects something foul and helps Ms. Bergman recover her self-belief and exposes the deceptions of her husband.
One of those who brought gaslighting to the public's attention is Yale psychoanalyst Robin Stern. Her 1996 The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life has been revised and republished in 2018. It is essential reading in the Age of Trump.
Dr. Stern gives two examples of gaslighting by Donald Trump and his campaign. Using Trump as a model of a gaslighter is appropriate. As of June 25, 2018, there were 2,800,000 hits for gaslighting on Google, and 365,000 hits for Donald Trump and gaslighting.
The first instance Robin Stern relates concerns comedian John Oliver's HBO weekly show "Last Week Tonight". On Halloween night 2015 aspiring candidate Trump tweeted, "John Oliver had his people call to ask me to be on his very boring and low rated show. I said "NO THANKS" Waste of time & energy!" Oliver tweeted back, "At no point did we invite Donald Trump to appear." Trump being Trump, as Stern relates, he then claimed Oliver's staff invited him to be on the show four or five times. Oliver reflected that he found this exchange "genuinely destabilizing" and in doubt of his own memory had his staff check and then reassure him in reality no invitation...