NPSI June Scientific Meeting
“A Peculiar People: Mormonism, Drag Performance, and Erotic Non-Belonging”
Danny Gellersen, LICSW, FIPA

In this presentation Danny Gellersen examines the psychic impact of religious cultural inheritance and queer sexual identity—an intersection rarely addressed directly in the psychoanalytic literature. Drawing from a decade-long analytic treatment, they explore how Mormonism, belief, and religious residue persist as uncanny, affectively charged presences within the transference and countertransference.

Using Freud’s concept of the uncanny, José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification theory, and Laplanche’s theory of après-coup, Gellersen traces how early theological inscriptions are reanimated in adult erotic life, dissociation, and experiences of non-belonging. Through clinical vignettes, dream material, and personal reflection, they consider how drag performance operates both as metaphor and praxis—destabilizing compulsive normativity while reclaiming erotic vitality.

Positioning the analytic relationship alongside the drag stage, Gellersen’s presentation invites psychoanalytic colleagues to consider how religious inheritance and sexual identity shape the analytic field in ways that have remained largely untheorized.

Learning Objectives:
After this presentation, participants will be able to:

1. Identify how religious and cultural inheritances may manifest as “uncanny” residues within transference and countertransference dynamics.

2. Apply Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Laplanche’s theory of après-coup to clinical material involving belief, depersonalization, and queer identity.

3. Evaluate how performance, disidentification, embodiment, and experiences of non-belonging can function as generative sites of erotic vitality within the analytic relationship.