Object Relations in the Museum: A Psychosocial Perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom

Heroes and Hostages: The Toll of the Bad Faith Narrative

Steeped as we are in a culture of therapy and emotionalism it may seem strange to us now to consider that until relatively recently, expressive writing was not encouraged among individuals who arguably are most in need of expressive outlet, those suffering from mental ill health. Indeed, there are examples of psychiatric patients instead being denied writing materials (Hornstein). Such denial however, apparently only succeeds in making the quest to produce autopathography (Couser ) more forceful and illness and trauma more demanding of expression. A bibliography of first-person narratives of madness compiled by Hornstein has now more than 700 titles listed. The propagation of such narratives extends into mainstream publishing, with an entire genre being steadily built up. Mainstream literature has also embraced stories about such stories with the creation of characters who, locked in psychiatric institutions, write out their story on unwanted paper-surplus to requirements which is then imprisoned under the floor-board (Barry ).div_PaS25pub4713pub