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Abstract
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.
Funding
This work was supported by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.
Notes on contributors
Prof. Lynn Froggett is Director of the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire. She has a cross-disciplinary background in the Humanities and Social Sciences and has researched the Socially Engaged Arts for over a decade. She has a particular interest in developing studies that incorporate both arts-based and social scientific methodologies and she studies the contribution of the arts to health, well-being, social justice, civic engagement and citizenship.
Dr Myna Trustram is a Research Associate at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She has worked for many years in curatorial, management and research roles within museums and galleries. She has trained with the Tavistock Clinic and the Institute for Group Analysis in the psychodynamics of organisations and groups. Her major project is called ‘Museum Melancholy: Loss in the midst of plenty’ and uses psychoanalytic ideas to understand the roles of museums in both the inner and outer world and the places in between.
Notes
1. These vignettes are based on empirical projects evaluated or researched by the authors. They serve to bring to the mind of the reader the kind of experience we are writing about and we refer back to them as illustrative of one of the key points of the article.
2. The website of The Association for Psychosocial Studies provides an introduction to this field of academic enquiry: http://www.psychosocial-studies-association.org.
3. The research report is available at http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/3362/. It was undertaken by the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire with the collaboration of the museums. Thanks are due to Alan Farrier, Konstantina Poursanidou and Suzanne Hacking for their contributions. Examples from the project will be used by way of illustration only since our purpose is to explore the value of object relations theory to museums.
4. The museums (Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Bolton Museum and Archive Service, Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery) were all members of the North West Renaissance Hub that was set up by the Renaissance in the Regions programme in 2005. The collaboration of the project leaders was essential to the research and their contribution is acknowledged with gratitude.
5. Approval for the research was granted by the regional National Health Service ethics committee, after full ethical review. All invitations to join groups were subject to approved conventions. Informed consent and confidentiality were assured subject to the constraints of group-based activities. Given the vulnerable nature of some of the participants, appropriate support and de-briefing were assured in all cases if they were required. The research process was overseen by a steering group composed of representatives from each of the museums that met at three-monthly intervals.
6. The observation of affect, in the absence of interview-based confirmation, presupposes the ethnographer's ability to correctly interpret behavioural signals (laughter indicates amusement, curiosity leads to continued questioning and so on). The interpretation is then triangulated with further data, in this case from the poetry writing session where amusement and curiosity were also expressed.
7. Although personal experience and cultural meaning are always in part mutually constitutive, a psychosocial perspective would hold that elements of personal experience are biographical, dispositional, embodied and non-discursive. Experience cannot be assimilated to meaning or vice versa, the two are always in tension.
8. Dr We use the term ‘cultural object’ in a loose Winnicottian sense as something that is part of ‘the inherited tradition … the common pool of humanity’ (Citation1988 [Citation1971], 116).