In what could be a battle of egos, the Freud Museum has filed a Serious Incident Report to the Charities Commission over an internal dispute between some members of staff and a section of the London institution’s board of trustees.
The report is a legal requirement from the Commission, requiring ‘frank’ internal reflection on whether there have been alleged ‘incidents that have resulted in or risk significant harm to beneficiaries and other people who come into contact with the charity through its work’, as well as in the case of financial irregularities.
The Guardian reports a group of external ‘friends’, including former directors, as well as writers and thinkers such as Susie Orbach, Slavoj Žižek, Hanif Kureishi and Marina Warner, have written to the Commission in support of staff. ‘Many of us have worked at or with the museum since its opening in 1986, and there has simply never been a comparable degradation of staff-board relations or any comparable efforts to run the museum in an autocratic and partisan way.’
Susanna Abse, a trustee at the museum told the newspaper, ‘We have nothing to hide. There are no secrets, no special agenda.’
The house museum, which includes the psychoanalyst’s couch, is situated in the Hampstead property Sigmund Freud lived in for the last year of his life, having fled the Nazis in 1938.
