Lives of Khan

What do we know with certainty about the life of Masud Khan? Khan was born in 1924 in the Punjab, the second son of a marriage that united an elderly Shiite Muslim father who had acquired power and wealth in the service of the British and a bride who was still in her teens. Khan apparently suffered a depression during his adolescence and was treated by a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In 1946, he immigrated to London, where he became a candidate at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. He entered analysis first with Ella Freeman Sharpe, then with John Rickman – these first two analyses were cut off prematurely by the death of each analyst – and then, famously, with Donald Woods Winnicott. After several unsuccessful attempts, Khan was named a training analyst at the Institute in 1959. He published influential papers on schizoid states, perversion, and the role of regression in the analytic setting, among many subjects. Many of these papers are collected in the three volumes, The Privacy of the Self (Khan, 1974), Alienation in Perversions (Khan, 1979a) and Hidden Selves (Khan, 1983). Khan also assumed, and performed with considerable success, important editorial roles in the international psychoanalytic community. Khan’s career spiraled downward, beginning with the incidental exposure, in 1965, of false claims he had made concerning his relationship with an important analyst. Subsequently, a growing awareness among his colleagues of Khan’s longstanding boundary violations – these included affairs with woman patients, among them a woman candidate – led to Khan’s forced resignation of his Training Analyst status in 1977. Finally, Khan’s publication of a fourth volume, When Spring Comes (Khan, 1988), in which he depicts his interventions with patients as wild rants, infused with anti-Semitism and sexual slurs, led to his expulsion by the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Khan, who had survived a diagnosis of terminal cancer in 1976, died of the effects of alcoholism in 1989, less than a year after his expulsion from the British Society. Int J Psychoanal (2008) 89:1251–1261 1251