“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.
About the Presenter
Danny Gellersen, LICSW, FIPA, is a licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalyst with a private practice in Seattle, Washington and New York State. They are a graduate of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, National Training Program in New York City, and resides in Seattle full-time, where they teach on the faculties of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and chairs the Distinguished Speaker Series for the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study. Their practice and studies as an artist, writer, educator, and student of realist classical drawing, Mormonism, queer theory, and drag performance are greatly intertwined with their clinical werk.
About the Moderator
Caron Harrang, LICSW, FIPA, BCPsa is a board-certified psychoanalyst with a full-time private practice in Seattle, Washington. She is an IPA training and supervising psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and teaches throughout North America. Her recent publications include co-editor and chapter author of the Gradiva Award–winning Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2021); “Introduction. Truth and Lies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives” (2023); “On Grotstein’s ‘Truth’ in Bion’s Theory of ‘O’” (2023); Nancy C. Winters, Caron Harrang, and Stefanie Sedlacek, “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (2024); “Earthquakes in the Analytic Field: A Post-Bionian View of Negative Therapeutic Reaction” (2025); and “Binocular Vision as a Function of the Analytic Field” (in press). For additional information, see www.caronharrang.com.
