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We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm. (Winston Churchill)
Within the psychoanalytic movement, Masud Khan's reputation hovers somewhere between inspiration, curiosity and blight. Khan, after all, made intriguing theoretical contributions, helped some patients, provided valuable editorial assistance to prominent analysts, inflicted irreparable damage on people who deserved better, and wreaked serious havoc on the integrity of his profession. He could be brutally honest and maddeningly mendacious. He vigorously fabricated for the sake of posterity and disdained those who, he said, ‘have lost the verve of imaginative truth through escaping into tape-recorder-clinical realism’. When the idea of removing Khan from membership in the British Psycho-Analytical Society was first entertained, Anna Freud remarked: ‘If we do not throw him out, we have further trouble ahead - whereas if we do, we deprive ourselves of one of our most gifted people.’
Roger Willoughby, in his biography of Khan, places his faith in the adjudicating power of facts to make sense of all this. For Willoughby, historical evidence serves a ‘paternal function dissolving narcissistic and symbiotic illusions’. He tells us that he seeks to ‘move beyond the preferred myths to trace, via a psychoanalytic textual archaeology, the sometimes tellingly banal, but often more complex and intriguing realities of Khan's biography and intellectual history’. Willoughby hopes that by assembling facts he can illuminate Khan's dissembling.
Part of Willoughby's method is straightforward enough. He has combed the records of the British Society, interviewed numerous people who had dealings and relationships with Khan, perused exchanges of letters between colleagues and friends, and drawn heavily upon Khan's own work-books. Willoughby has done, for the most part, the respectable job of any good