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.
Two important contributions of Masud Khan to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice were his concepts of cumulative trauma and the protective maternal shield, with the implication that psychological damage may occur less as a ‘once at a crash’, than as recurring psychic dents from which the mother has consistently failed to protect her child.
Judy Cooper's memoir of Khan's life and work is informed by the relationship of these concepts to Khan's own history and personality. A perpetual exile, even in Pakistan, the land of his birth, born of an aged, patrician father and a socially unacceptable courtesan, Khan saw himself as blending his mother's sensitivity with his father's autocracy. His lifelong unresolved turmoils seemed to embody the scandal of his conception from which maternal devotion could never adequately shield him. As a talented and well-favoured youth with the sole blemish of a deformed ear, he left Pakistan for London and the British Society, in an insatiable thirst for recognition, for renown - and for full analysis. Here, his intellectual virtuosity, diligence and clinical skills won him gradual, if reluctant acceptance. For his seemingly bottomless narcissism, with a grandiose disregard of established convention and clinical boundaries, sowed discord in his relationships, both professional and personal. The onset of cancer and its spread over the last twenty years of his life coincided with his increasing exclusion from the Society, which he bitterly ascribed to the disease rather than to his actual misdemeanours.
Shattered in adolescence by the deaths within a year of his father and beloved younger sister, Khan then had to face the loss, after a year in each case of both his analysts - Ella Sharpe and John Rickman. Finally, in Winnicott he found a holding and containing analytic mother/father who nevertheless - sadly for Khan - failed to withstand Khan's ‘destruction of the object’. Cooper quotes (p. 21 from Khan 1969, Vicissitudes of the Self,