NPSI June 2026 Scientific Meeting: "A Peculiar People: Mormonism, Drag Performance, and Erotic Non-Belonging” presented by Danny Gellersen, LICSW

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.