Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality Book

"Few psychoanalysts from the latter half of the twentieth century have been as intellectually prolific, charismatic and ultimately scandalous as Masud Khan." "Masud Khan: the Myth and the Reality is the first in-depth scholarly account of his life. It charts his beginnings in the Punjab, where he submerged himself in English literature during the turbulent decades before independence and partition, through his psychoanalytic apprenticeship with Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott in post-war London and a spectacular climb to international prominence, to his final years of womanising, depression, alcoholism, and cancer." As the story of Khan's life here unfolds, so too does consideration of his key ideas and papers. His early work includes important discussions on the self, its development aided by the protective shield and distortion through cumulative trauma and perversion. Acutely aware of the potentially dislocating impact of others, the ways in which self-experience might be actualised, particularly through dreams and quiet fallow states, became an important theme in Khan's subsequent writings. These and other topics, including his discussions of literature and culture, are reviewed here with their biographical roots clarified.