Witnessed, Not Saved: Visual Psychoanalysis at the Edge of Queer Aging and Endings

Christian Schulz-Quach, MD Psychoanalysis has long theorised mortality, yet its developmental grammar remains largely cis-heteronormative: linear stages, biological generativity, and a mourning process that culminates in closure. What happens to that grammar when the person approaching death has spent a lifetime outside it? This presentation centres on On Queer Aging and Endings (2025, 19 min.), an award-winning short documentary and the first film from existentials:lab. Shot in Norway in the home of the trans physician, sexologist and queer rights advocate Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad and their partner, the sexologist Elsa Almås, the film accompanies them as they live with Esben Esther's stage IV cancer. It is an experiment in what I call visual psychoanalysis: a method that brings analytic listening, existential-phenomenological inquiry, and cinematic observation into a single dialogical field, deliberately leaving room for silence, the unguarded, and the unsayable. Following a screening of the film, I will open three lines of inquiry with the TICP community. First, queer loneliness: the compound of existential confrontation with finitude and the intersubjective residue of exclusion, ageism, and the erosion of late-life networks. Second, annihilation anxiety as a shared, contextual dread of erasure rather than a purely intrapsychic one, and the unconscious defence against ageing and endings enacted within youth-oriented queer spaces themselves. Third, and centrally, positive belonging. This is Esben Esther's own concept, developed with Elsa Almås, in which belonging is achieved when others perceive us as we perceive ourselves and attach positive value to what they see, and in which good gender belonging is not the absence of dysphoria but gender enthusiasm, gender euphoria. In the film, this thoroughly intersubjective achievement is still being made at the very end of a life, in a body that is failing. I will place it alongside the emerging literature on queer joy and the shift from minority stress toward minority strength: joy that is bold, radical and defiant, and joy found in quiet moments of connection with chosen family. What does it ask of our clinical listening if belonging and joy are not consolation prizes awarded once suffering has been catalogued, but the organising achievement of a queer life, including its ending? Drawing on Lifton's modes of symbolic immortality, I will argue that Esben Esther is neither fighting nor collapsing into death, but composing a self that endures. The clinical provocation for us is simple and difficult: queer and trans people facing mortality do not need to be saved or inspired. They need to be witnessed, and we need imaginative languages, including visual ones, adequate to that witnessing.