‘Museums on prescription’: Reparative logic and the ethical dilemma of curating ambivalence

This article provides an analysis of the prescription of museum visits as a form of preventative and remedial health care within Rx: Community, a 2018–2019 pilot project for social prescription based in Ontario, Canada. I turn to Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic framework to position ‘museums-on-prescription’ as a redemptive strategy of museology’s foundational paranoid and manic reparative logic. By situating this within the representational specificity of the Canadian context, this article ultimately critiques the museum’s prescribability as a defence against the museum’s inherent ambivalence – how its purported goodness is inextricable from its historical and ongoing role as a settler colonial nation-building institution.