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Speak of Me as I Am is a brilliant Masudic title chosen by Judy Cooper for her biography of Masud Khan. She has written here a most sensitive and authoritative account of this eccentric, fascinating, devilishly provocative, extremely gifted, creative and infinitely complex personality that was Masud Kahn, the psychoanalyst.
To write his biography is a stunningly difficult task, a real challenge, and obviously even more so if the writer has been his analysand. For Masud Khan could be so wounding, so cruel, so grandiose, and so self-destructively narcissistic; and yet he was also so erudite, so caring and warm, compassionate and sensitive and a loyal friend, as I myself know.
I knew Masud, and we were friends for many years, but Judy Cooper has discovered and traced out so many facts about his origins, family, childhood and early adult life which I had not known in such detail, but which she has used to help make some sense of his character, temperament, his theoretical constructions, his clinical practice and his virtues and vices that she has made this book a truly heroic achievement.
Masud Khan was the youngest and most favoured son of a powerful and wealthy man, Raja Fazaldad Khan, who at the age of 76 married his fourth wife, a beautiful singing and dancing girl of 17 years of age. This marriage was much disapproved of by his older sons and other children. Although as Judy Cooper writes, ‘it is not unknown for a rich Raja to marry a courtesan’, yet his mother's background did isolate Masud Khan and make him something of an outsider in his own culture. Although coming to England removed Masud from the ambiguous status he had in Pakistan, it entangled him in a different ambiguous situation and conflict — his identity as an Asian belonging to the Moslem faith as against the Western and very British or even French cultures he had sought out and partially adopted. Thus it is not surprising that he was ‘a mass of splits and contradictions’; his identity was in fact very f