You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Once upon a time, in the 1970s and early 1980s, many of us thought of Masud Khan as the most interesting, helpful psychoanalytic writer on schizoid states and perversions, and even more broadly on the treatment of very difficult patients. Teaching perversion in the second-year course on psychopathology at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, I especially wanted candidates to read articles by Khan (1962, 1964, 1965a, b, 1969) that seemed to me to best capture and evoke how it feels to work with perverse patients. I drew on Khan's ideas in my own writing. I have found them very helpful, and have admired Khan as a clear and evocative writer.
Younger psychoanalysts may now know little about Masud Khan except for his notoriety, especially after the publication of three biographies (Cooper 1993; Willoughby 2005; Hopkins 2006). He comes across as unable to contain his narcissistic neediness, arrogantly misusing others—patients, colleagues, wives, lovers, friends—for his own needs, destructive toward himself and others, violent, vulnerable, unpredictable, unreliable, untrustworthy. Charming and charismatic, worldly, smart, literate, and exotic, he quickly captivated the psychoanalytic world, only to crash and burn when he provoked and enraged the British psychoanalytic establishment with his boundary crossing and boundary violations with his patients, and with his alcoholism, extravagant storytelling and lying, and other outrageous behavior. Before his fall, he published three extraordinary books and many articles, served as editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library and as associate editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, edited and helped write a number of Donald Winnicott's papers, and in general had become a luminary in the psychoanalytic world. Afterward, his status as a training analyst and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and his membership in the International Psychoanalytical Association we