Letters

Dear Editor,

I would like to clarify the somewhat misleading account given in your journal (Volume 26, No. 2) of the destruction of the confidential Khan archive that the IPA held, together with its worldwide copyright of the archived papers, until 2041. I bore witness to the IPA Board's discussions about the archive as I was an IPA Board member for the two years prior to the destruction of the Khan papers. I was also the only British analyst who happened to be an Independent member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and who knew much about Khan and even taught his works.

Your contributor suggests that ‘The fate of his archive had been subjected to vehement discussions within the IPA until April 1991’. This is not true. When Masud Khan died on 7 June 1989, Harry Karnac visited his flat and found disarray, with clinical notes and correspondence, including some 39 bound volumes of ‘The Workbooks’ with the alarming news from Paul Kimber (the designated estate attorney) that all the contents in the flat would be destroyed. Karnac phoned Christopher Bollas urging him to contact Kimber which is what Bollas did. Bollas immediately wrote to J.-B. Pontalis, Robert Stoller and Adam Limentani urging them to write to Kimber to urge him not to destroy the papers as there was a valued archival history. Kimber was persuaded and the next 15 months were spent by this group of people conferring and deciding that the only safe place for Khan's complex communications and papers was for them to be held by the IPA in order to ensure that no confidential or salacious materials were passed on to future generations that would harm psychoanalysis. All these considerations and communications are documented and will be made available for public scrutiny at the proper time and place.

The archivists of the IPA who followed Limentani – especially Anne Hayman – were very clear about the agreement of the IPA to archive the Khan papers but it was disturbingly clear at Board meetings later in 2018