Transforming collapse: Applying clinical psychoanalysis to the relational design of the National September 11 Memorial Museum¹

1 An earlier version of this paper was published in DIVISION/Review #13, 2015. The author thanks DIVISION/Review for the kind permission to reprint it.

Abstract

Symbolic of what we have possessed, lost, and wish to remember, the arts can memorialize cultural experiences too telling for mere speech. Aided by art, design, and storytelling, the many millions of visitors to the National September 11 Memorial Museum are remembering together not just one or more individuals or local communities, but an entire world that no longer exists. This paper details the collaboration between exhibition designer, Tom Hennes of Thinc Design, and myself, a psychoanalytic psychologist, in the relational design of the museum. This process entailed use of parallel and intertwined perspectives on how to help visitors remember, commemorate, honor, educate, witness, and mourn in order to transform unspeakable destruction into a creative reconstruction of continuity and vitality. How a psychoanalytic consultation to a museum design team developed from applying a few theoretical principles to a more generalizable model will be illustrated with narrative accounts of key moments.

Key words:

• National September 11 Memorial Museum
• memorialization
• symbolization
• mass trauma
• historical trauma
• relational psychoanalysis
• relational design
• aesthetics of care
• mourning
• ethical community of memory
• memorials
• Nachtraglichkeit

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was published in DIVISION/Review #13, 2015. The author thanks DIVISION/Review for the kind permission to reprint it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Billie A. Pivnick

Billie A. Pivnick, PhD, is faculty and supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child/Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program, the New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Writing, and Columbia University Teachers College. She is co-chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of American Psychological Association’s Division 39, as well as member-at-large of Section Five, and has served as consulting psychologist to Thinc Design, the exhibition designers partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. She was winner of the 2015 Schillinger Memorial Essay Award for her essay, “Spaces to stand in: Applying clinical psychoanalysis to the relational design of the National September 11 Memorial Museum,” and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research’s 1992 Stanley Berger Award for the contribution to psychoanalysis made by her research. She is also the author of numerous articles published in academic texts and peer-reviewed journals.