Monitor - September 2014

Questionnaire
Thanks to psychologist Billie Pivnick, the new 9/11 Museum in New York City was designed with
visitors’ mental health in mind.
Memorializing a tragedy
BY ANNA MILLER
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, psychologist Billie Pivnick, PhD,
was preparing to see patients in her
Greenwich Village office when a plane
struck the first tower of the World Trade
Center. Her first patient called to cancel,
saying she was going to help. Her second
patient came in, frantic because her
partner, who worked in the World Trade
Center, wasn’t answering her phone.
Pivnick could relate: She couldn’t get
in touch with her husband, a criminal
defense attorney, who was in court either
in a World Trade Center building or a
few blocks away near Foley Square.
“So while I’m listening to the patient,
I’m also in my own panic,” Pivnick
remembers.
Meanwhile, her sons — ages 8 and
12 at the time — were watching the
violent scene unfold from the 12th-story
window of their school in Brooklyn.
Fortunately, the family returned
home safely. Her husband, who had
been near Foley Square when the first
plane hit, ended up among the masses
running across the Brooklyn Bridge as
the first tower fell. He picked up their
boys at school and met Pivnick at home
in Brooklyn hours later.

“When I finally reached home and
was in my husband’s arms, I could cry
and mourn,” says Pivnick, who had
walked home across the Manhattan
Bridge. “Then I had to work on pulling
my own children together because they
had witnessed this thing.”
As a clinical psychologist specializing
in loss and trauma, Pivnick knew how to
do that. For one, the family helped to raise
money for new firefighter equipment so
they could “do something active … to
try to reverse the helplessness,” she says.

She and her sons also became regular visitors to a firehouse that had lost eight men in the attacks. Today, one of Pivnick’s sons is a first responder and the other is studying to become an emergency medical technician.

“I do believe the experience
imprinted them in a very fundamental
way,” she says.

In the years since the tragedy, Pivnick, who has worked on several museum exhibits, including at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the Connecticut Science Center, has been using these same skills on a broader scale: To help design the National September

11 Memorial Museum, which opened in June near the site of the attacks. As the consulting psychologist to the design firm Thinc Design, Pivnick spent five years working with exhibition designers, curators and other museum professionals to help inform the museum’s visitor experience. The goal? “To make it alive enough to feel the emotions and the reality of what went on, but not so alive that it’s unbearable,” she says.

Pivnick talked to the Monitor about
the museum and her role in its design.

What does the museum look like?
There are really two main exhibits. The
first exhibit, the memorial exhibit, has an
outer perimeter where you see all of the
many photos of the people who perished
lined up as far as the eye can see, as well
as an inner sort of sanctum, which is
dimly lit, where people may contemplate
the lives of individuals we lost. In
the outer area, there are touch screen
tables where you can call up the name
of someone you want to remember or
learn more about. You are also given the
option to project that person’s story on
the wall of the inner room. We thought
of it as “the zone of the many and the
zone of the one”; the idea was to create
an opportunity for some intersubjective
witnessing so that while you’re feeling
your own pain, you’re also aware that
other people are suffering, too. The
whole spirit of the museum is how
to honor these multiple perspectives,
multiple narratives and multiple points
of view on the history behind it.

The museum’s second exhibit is
historical. It’s telling the story of the day.

You walk through the day chronologically and you are able to make choices: You can stay on the perimeter with the facts or you can have a more intensely emotional experience by looking at personal artifacts found on the site. You can also choose to look at photos of people who jumped or hear voices of some of those terrible, awful wrenching phone calls, which are so much more distressing because they feel so present.