Gaslighting: From Patrick Hamilton’s Play to Modern Psychology

In 1944, Ingrid Bergman shed tears of joy during her Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Actress. The role she had played was that of a woman gradually led to doubt her own sanity by her husband. In the film, the husband secretly dims the gas lights and tells her, “The light hasn’t changed.” Until she begins to doubt her own eyes. More than 80 years later, the title of that film has become a common noun meaning psychological manipulation. But here is the intriguing part: Patrick Hamilton, the original author of this story, was himself someone whose grasp on reality had been stolen by another person.

Patrick Hamilton: A Story Written from Shattered Reality

Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton (1904–1962) was a British novelist and playwright. His signature work Rope (1929) became famous when Alfred Hitchcock later adapted it into a film, but Hamilton’s own life was darker than any of his creations.

In 1932, Hamilton was struck by a speeding car while walking with his wife on a street in Earl’s Court, London.^[1] He suffered multiple fractures and was left with permanent facial scars. A limp became part of his daily life from that point on, and his drinking escalated severely. Two years later, in 1934, his mother took her own life.^[2]

Hamilton wrote Gas Light in 1938, six years after the accident. Some researchers believe that the cognitive disorientation he experienced after the accident — the experience of doubting his own senses and memory — was reflected in the work’s central motif.^[3] Indeed, the most chilling moment in Gas Light is not one of violence. It is the moment when the wife says “the gaslight has dimmed” and the husband quietly replies “No, it hasn’t” — the moment when reality itself is denied.

The Play Gas Light: Domestic Horror in the Victorian Era

Gas Light premiered on December 5, 1938, at the Richmond Theatre in London, before transferring to the Apollo Theatre in the West End on January 1 of the following year, where it ran for 141 performances.^[4]

The setting is 1880s Victorian London. The husband, Jack Manningham, relentlessly questions his wife Bella’s memory and judgment. Objects disappear from their places, a picture on the wall moves, and every night at the same time the gaslights grow dim. Each time Bella points out these changes, Jack dismisses her: “You’re imagining things.”^[5]

The reason the gaslights dim is simple. Jack is in a sealed attic room in the same building, where he has turned on the gas lights to search for something. In the 19th-century gas piping system, when more gas is used in one place, the flames elsewhere in the building weaken.^[6] Bella’s senses were accurate, but under Jack’s systematic denial, she comes to doubt her own mind.

What elevates this work beyond a mere thriller is Hamilton’s remarkably precise depiction of the abuser’s strategy. Jack never resorts to violence. Instead, he employs three techniques. First, he creates small changes and then denies them. Second, he isolates his wife socially. Third, he enlists a third party (the maid) to confirm his wife’s “strange behavior.” The core mechanisms of gaslighting, as defined by psychologists 80 years later, were already fully contained here.^[7]

It is also worth noting why Hamilton chose to set the play in the 1880s. By 1938, electric lighting had already become commonplace. The technological conditions of gas lighting — the physical phenomenon where light intensity in one part of a house was linked to gas consumption elsewhere — made for a trick that was only possible in the Victorian era. Hamilton deliberately exploited this anachronistic technology to dramatize the question “Is what you see with your own eyes real?” on a physical level.

Angel Street on Broadway: The Curtain Rises the Day Before Pearl Harbor

In 1941, Vincent Price and his wife Edith Barrett attended a small-scale production of Gas Light in Los Angeles, after which they secured the Broadway production rights.^[8] In the United States, the title was changed to Angel Street, with Vincent Price playing the villainous Jack Manningham, Judith Evelyn as Bella, and Leo G. Carroll as the detective.

Opening night was December 5, 1941. Two days later, on December 7, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into war.^[9] One critic recorded the sequence of events: “The show opened on December 5, rave reviews appeared on December 6 with long lines forming outside the theater, and on December 7 the show was forgotten.” Yet Angel Street overcame the initial shock and continued its run for more than three years, totaling 1,295 performances. This stands as one of the longest runs for a non-musical play in Broadway history.^[10]

There are several interpretations for why the play succeeded during wartime. Some critics suggest that amid wartime anxiety, audiences were drawn to a “controllable fear” — the psychological suspense on stage. In the face of the macroscopic terror of war, the microscopic terror within a household paradoxically served as a form of escapism.

Two Films: A Destroyed Print and an Immortal Performance

The 1940 British Film

Buoyed by the play’s success, the first film adaptation was produced in Britain. In 1940, director Thorold Dickinson cast Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard.^[11] The film was praised for faithfully reproducing the claustrophobic horror of the original, though it received only limited distribution commercially.

MGM’s Attempt to Destroy the Film

Four years later, Hollywood’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) acquired the remake rights. In the process, one of the most controversial decisions in film history was made. As a condition of the contract, MGM demanded the destruction of all negative film and prints of the 1940 British version.^[12] The reason was straightforward: they wanted to completely eliminate from the market any existing version that could compete with their remake.

This attempt ultimately failed. The British Film Institute (BFI) and several private collectors preserved prints, and from the 1950s onward the British version could be screened again.^[13] Ironically, this incident bears an uncanny resemblance to the very essence of gaslighting — an attempt to make something that existed seem as though it “never existed,” and the failure of that attempt.

The 1944 Hollywood Film

Director George Cukor’s 1944 MGM production Gaslight was the definitive work that brought the story to global attention.^[14] Ingrid Bergman played the victim Paula, Charles Boyer the abuser Gregory, and Joseph Cotten the detective Brian Cameron who comes to Paula’s aid. Angela Lansbury also made her film debut in the role of the maid Nancy.

The film altered the original’s plot. Paula is a woman who grew up in the aftermath of the murder of her aunt Alice, a famous opera singer, and Gregory is in fact the killer, searching the attic for the aunt’s jewels. Each time Gregory turns on the gas lights in the attic, the lights on the floor below — connected by the same piping — grow dim. When Paula points this out, Gregory dismisses it as “your imagination.”^[15]

Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 17th Academy Awards for this performance. The film received a total of seven nominations and won two awards, including Best Art Direction.^[16] Bergman’s performance was especially lauded because she allowed the audience to experience the process of gaslighting through Paula’s perspective. The audience sees the light dim along with her, but the moment the husband denies it, even the audience momentarily questions their own judgment. This experience was the crucial reason the word could become a common noun 80 years later.

From Stage to Clinic: The Birth of a Psychological Term

The word “gaslighting” first appeared in academic literature in 1969, twenty-five years after the film’s release. British psychiatrists R.P. Barton and J.A. Whitehead published a paper titled “The Gas-Light Phenomenon” in the medical journal The Lancet.^[17] The paper analyzed three cases, all involving family members who had deliberately made the other person question their mental state in order to have them forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. The motives were asset seizure or the removal of a troublesome relative.

However, for several decades after this paper, “gaslighting” was scarcely used in academic literature. The New York Times used the word only nine times over the following 20 years.^[18] The concept did not receive serious academic treatment until 2007, when Dr. Robin Stern, co-founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a psychoanalyst, published The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life.^[19]

Stern systematically categorized gaslighting into types: the “Glamour Gaslighter,” who initially approaches with charm before gradually shifting to criticism and blame; the “Good-Guy Gaslighter,” who conceals their agenda behind a facade of goodwill; and the “Intimidator Gaslighter,” who uses anger and silence as threats.^[20] This classification helped elevate gaslighting from a subcategory of domestic violence to an independent type of psychological manipulation.

In 2019, three major academic papers were published simultaneously, expanding gaslighting research across disciplines. Psychohistorian Ken Fuchsman published “Gaslighting” in The Journal of Psychohistory, sociologist Paige L. Sweet published “The Sociology of Gaslighting” in American Sociological Review, and philosopher Cynthia A. Stark published “Gaslighting, Misogyny, and Psychological Oppression” in The Monist.^[21]

One important point must be addressed here. Gaslighting is not listed as an official clinical term in the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).^[22] This means that gaslighting is a term describing the perpetrator’s behavioral pattern, not a diagnosis for the victim. This distinction matters. The essential function of the concept is not to diagnose “whether you are a gaslighting victim,” but to identify “whether someone is engaging in gaslighting.”

A Psychological Term Becomes an Everyday Word

It was from the mid-2010s onward that gaslighting exploded beyond the academic sphere into popular language. Several social conditions underpinned this shift.

First, the spread of social media. As the culture of sharing personal experiences expanded on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the label “gaslighting” began to be attached to psychological manipulation experiences that had previously been difficult to name. Once named, the experiences became visible, and the newly visible experiences in turn spread the name further.

Second, the expansion of political context. Around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “gaslighting” was frequently used to describe political rhetoric. That same year, the American Dialect Society selected “gaslight” as the Most Useful Word of the Year for 2016, defining it as “to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity.”^[23]

In 2018, Oxford University Press listed “gaslight” as a candidate for Word of the Year^[24], and decisively, in 2022, the Merriam-Webster dictionary selected “gaslighting” as its Word of the Year. The dictionary noted that searches for the word had increased by 1,740% over the course of 2022, and highlighted as remarkable the fact that this interest was sustained throughout the year rather than driven by any single event.^[25] Merriam-Webster explained: “In this age of misinformation — of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes — gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time.”

However, this rapid spread has also brought side effects. Some mental health professionals express concern that the term is being used far too broadly.^[26] When disagreements, simple lies, and discrepancies in memory are all labeled “gaslighting,” the distinction between these and the systematic, intentional reality distortion that the term originally described becomes blurred. In 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) defined gaslighting as having “once referred to manipulation so extreme as to drive the victim toward mental illness or to justify their commitment to a psychiatric institution,” thereby recalling the original weight of its meaning.^[27]

In South Korea as well, gaslighting spread rapidly from around 2018. Between 2020 and 2021 in particular, the “gaslighting” frame was applied to several social incidents, and major media outlets and broadcasters began using the word frequently. The National Institute of Korean Language proposed the Korean-language replacement “simni jibae” (psychological domination), but the loanword “gaslighting” has overwhelmingly established itself in popular usage.

Conclusion

In 1938, Patrick Hamilton wrote a thriller set in the Victorian era. The most terrifying element of that work was not murder, but a single utterance: “What you saw is not real.” Eighty-six years later, that utterance has become a common noun, having passed through a play, two films, an academic monograph, and a dictionary’s Word of the Year.

Yet the most paradoxical chapter in the history of this term lies elsewhere. The way gaslighting works is by stripping names from the victim’s experience. “This isn’t manipulation,” “You’re just being sensitive,” “That never happened.” When an experience is denied a name, it ceases to exist. What Hamilton’s play created, and what Barton and Whitehead’s paper, Robin Stern’s book, and Merriam-Webster’s selection each accomplished in their respective eras, was precisely the opposite. They gave the experience a name. They declared that the dimming of the gaslight was not an illusion but a fact, and that this phenomenon had a name.

Just as MGM tried to erase the 1940 British print, the essence of gaslighting is the erasure of evidence. But what the history of this term demonstrates is that once something has been named, it is not easily erased.