Gaslighting¶
Film, 1938
Telling a person something didn’t happen, when it blatantly did.
In his 1938 play “Gas Light”, Patrick Hamilton created a psychological horror plot where an abusive husband sneaks out at night to switch the house lighting on after his wife has extinguished it, subsequently to convince her she is imagining it. First mentioned in Anthony Wallace’s 1961 “Culture & Personality”, it was followed in 1969 by Stanley Plog, a social scientist specialising in… leisure and tourism, co-opted it for his book “Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness”.
- https://oed.com/view/Entry/255554
- https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=gaslight
- https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gaslight
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Light
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
- https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Personality-Anthony-F-Wallace/dp/0394308565
- https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Perspectives-Mental-Illness-S-C/dp/0030746809