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.

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Unlike other cultural forms, museums have escaped sustained attention from perspectives that call upon psychoanalysis. This essay uses psychoanalytic concepts to explore the psychodynamics of museums today, focusing on health and well-being projects run in museums in Manchester, U.K. Evoking the idea of the museum as an asylum, the essay argues that museums, like asylums, are places of loss and melancholia and calls upon object relations theories, including those of D.W. Winnicott and Christopher Bollas, to explore this idea. Museums’ commitment to preservation and longevity is juxtaposed to the knowledge of mortality and the inward desire to break up objects. The essay argues that museums have the potential to contain, in all its meanings, not only physical objects but also the inner objects that those museum objects elaborate.

This paper outlines the buildings of the British labour movement. Hitherto, labour activists, historians and heritage professionals have focused on the artefacts and archives as opposed to the many historic buildings of the labour movement. The narrative closely follows the course of the industrial revolution and the accompanying development of the labour movement from its beginnings in the 18 th century. Examples cover a wide range including the artisan trade societies, Utopian Owenite settlements and purpose-built radical and trade union premises. The authors make a brief critique of the paper itself as an example of the intangible heritage of the labour movement. It concludes with a consideration of why these buildings are relatively neglected and suggests that the notion 'don't mourn, organise' might contain some clues as to specific reasons for their neglect.

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