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This book is well-researched, excellent reading as biography or for those interested in the history, psychology and politics of psychoanalysis. It analyses Khan's origins, locating him within a colonial and post-colonial context; Willoughby succeeds in creating both a critical and sympathetic portrait of a probably brilliant but blighted individual, who has had an enormous influence on contemporary psychoanalysis.
I found Khan's writing lucid and illuminating when I trained as a psychoanalytic therapist in the early 1980s and was recently disturbed by the revelations of his obvious misconduct as a practising analyst, so I felt compelled to read this illuminating account of his life. The book supplies substantial evidence of his arrogance, illusions of omnipotence, his cruelty and his descent into delusion. At the same time, it compassionately highlights his loneliness and alienation in a foreign culture. Willoughby emphasizes the acuity of the intelligence and challenge that Khan brought to bear on both the culture and practice of psychoanalysis, particularly his original thinking about the often obscure workings of perversion, in its guise both as a sickness and as a protest. Willoughby has investigated Khan's history including his analytic background in considerable depth, including a seemingly fair but critical account of his analysis with Winnicott. Willoughby might have become the sensitive and generous biographer of Khan's dreams, as described by Khan, a biographer who has to:
collate and decipher the verity from the myriad half-truths and self-representations … in the case of persons who vigorously self-narrated themselves for posterity and saw themselves as ‘prophets’ in one guise or another. (p. 216)
However, Willoughby's academic rigour and integrity mean that he never falls into Khan's sanction of the resort to fiction in biography:
To make human fabric from such self-creations takes both generosity and a shrewd sense of the real, as opposed to the true. Beca