Saturday 3 June 2017

case study or island of stability

Couched as we are in alternative truths and a totalitarian regime that would have us believe that we have always been at war with Eastasia, we appreciated this look back on the term gaslighting from the Neurocritic first through its contemporary resonance that insists on a new normal (that’s the most insidious thing for which we cannot afford to let our guard down), then looking back to its Victorian, domestic-noir origins and then to a series of citations in medical literature that appropriated the term from the 1944 film adaptation, already in colloquial use since the 1960s. This form of psychological terrorism uses trickery and deceit to plant seeds of doubt by means of persistent denial and contradiction and invalidate a counter-argument. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Though noticing a dip in the lights was dismissed as a figment of the abused’s imagination and seemed a rather insignificant detail to stake one’s sanity on, it was the one truth in the framing of the original story that the protagonist could find refuge in.