DEBORAH WINOGRAD, PhD
Deborah Winograd is a psychologist and clinical director of the Organizational Mind Group, PC. She is co-author of Workaches: The Neuroscience Guide to Surviving and Thriving at Work. Deborah maintains a clinical practice focusing on identity development and trauma survivorship. She is also a curriculum writer in applied social neuroscience. Deborah engages clay to free herself from rule and restriction--after years of struggling to understand and explain human emotion, thinking and behavior. The limitless nature of creating art relieves some tension, especially after being bound and frustrated by the limits of cognition and words. Her current piece—Space Junk—is dedicated to her wondrous family who remain her most treasured art.
Space Junk
(Mixed Media Clay, Acrylic & Junk on Canvas,
7" High x 7" Wide)
Space junk is a term used to describe debris that humans have left behind from missions in outer space. We leave footprints, both intentional and unintentional. Impacts of space junk are occasionally measurable, sometimes made by inference, but likely to be realized more in the future.
Psychological “junk” in the relational space between us is what is expressed in Space Junk. Assumingly unnecessary debris in the web between individuals. Chaotic and often opposing forces collide here--intense desire and drive towards attachment and powerful indelible impressions of annihilation, abandonment, anxiety, ambivalence and abuse.
All from conscious and nonconscious psychological debris left behind by those individuals who have crossed our developmental paths. There are even impacts of past generations in this abyss between and within us.
The junk is ours--we are the keepers of these neural footprints. Adaptation in service of survival overrides the interpersonal needs of the authentic self. There is intraference—the internal forces within all of us that oppose the yearning and struggle toward connection. Then, there are the two of us and interference—the forces in-between propelling the push-pull dynamics of relational struggles.
All this space junk, when all I have been struggling to do…
is to simply reach you.