Humans are fundamentally social beings. Having adequate attunement of our perceptions to the perceptions of those around us is an essential cornerstone to our sense of existential stability .
The subversion of these norms that orient us to the world, each other and ourselves is what makes the manipulation tactics demonstrated in “Gaslight” so viscerally disturbing.
The story follows the slow unfolding of a husband’s psychological exploitation of a wife’s increasingly vulnerable state. At the beginning of the film, we come to know that Ingrid Bergman’s character was orphaned early in life, and survived the traumatic murder of her primary caregiver at an early age. Already primed for relational vulnerability from these tragic circumstances, she is whisked away by a man who seeks her hand in marriage merely 2 weeks after first meeting each other. Charles Boyer’s character sets the scene for his nefarious plot with textbook progressions of psychological manipulation; isolating the victim from any other points of contact, planting the seeds for her to doubt her own perception in seemingly insignificant ways and increasing the victim’s sense that she would not be able to function without the abuser – interspersed with strategic shows of immense affection, fawning and gift giving to tighten the fabricated “bond”.
From an archetypal lens, characters and dynamics can be understood as symbolic depictions of the various forces at play in a single psyche. Primary masculine characters are often representations of the discursive thinking-mind. Boyer’s character is the discursive mind that is hyper-critical and encourages us to give away our agency to outer figures who “know better” by constantly denegrating our inner authority.
As “light” is often understood to be a symbol for consciousness and lucidity, the dimming of the gas-lights serve as a rich symbol for the progressively confused and powerless state Bergman’s character descends into as a result of Boyer’s manipulation.
Boyer is a manifestation of an inflated, and therefore unhealthy, discursive mind because instead of supporting the soul, he attempts to detach it from its source so that he can become its existential foundation, and thus become the owner of the soul’s wealth for its own gain. Specifically, Boyer was after Bergman’s inheritance, which he locked up in the attic, signifying how the inflated discursive mind seeks to concentrate the psyche’s inherited value (ie. wisdom from experience) up in the head- the discursive mind’s sense of it’s own dominion. This dissociation from the body and our innate sense of authority that occurs in conjunction with the over-concentrating of value closed up in the head is – to a significant degree – the state of most of us in our modern dis-embodied, overly-cognitive culture, and -to an extreme degree- what the psyche has a particular tendency towards when it has been exposed to trauma, as Bergman’s character is in the movie.
The alternative to this is a discursive mind which supports the soul, empowering her inner authority by rationalizing her perceptions in accordance with reality, rather than selfish delusion. This role is fulfilled by Joseph Cotton’s character who, in a very tender scene, becomes the first point of contact with reality that mirrors Bergman’s perceptions back to herself.
While archetypally we can understand this as a restorative turning point in a psychological process, what Cotton does here can mirror the work of a skilled therapist, or any other relationship where authentic interpersonal contact has a reparative effect on our sense of inner agency.
As much as we may desire a feminist alternative ending where Bergman does not immediately run into the arms of another man, when interpreted archetypally, we can understand that – especially after the dissolution of her previous worldview (as symbolized by Boyer)- a novel worldview that supports her rehabilitation (represented by Cotton) is a necessary structure for her to recuperate within in order to establish a generative orientation to herself and the world.
It is a paradox of being human that psychological maturity comes from both differentiating from the dependence on others to “rescue” us and allowing authentic human connection to repair what was once ruptured in relationship.