Queering Up Psychoanalysis – An Integrative Model with the Power to Meet the Moment

Psychoanalysis is trying to meet the moment in a variety of ways on a variety of psychosocial issues. This paper explores the existential and human identity ramifications that most reflect rapid social, cultural, and global change. The impacts of climate change, years of global pandemic, domestic, and international terrorism, as well as war and nuclear threats are on all of our minds and on the minds of our patients. All pose as existential threats. The urgency that these threats inspire have palpably and overtly shaken our identities. In this paper, I argue that crisis is an opportunity to deconstruct and make meaning and has always been the biggest catalyst for change on all levels. It is an opportunity for growth, evolution, and redefinition. The parallel processes of global, social, and macro-level identity crises reflect the identity crises we are contending with on the individual and intrapsychic level. Culturally we are witnessing an abundance of artistic creation with the subject of identity, the multiplicity of identities, and intersectionality. In this paper, I examine contemporary art forms such as television and literature to demonstrate the centrality of human identity as the necessary path forward in our relation to existential crisis. As the theory of everything in physics would unify and string together the four fundamental interactions of nature, this paper would unify and string together the four fundamental parts of the human psyche.Footnote1