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M. Masud R. Khan's third volume is a collection of ten papers, five theoretical and five clinical, originally published between 1975 and 1982. The first of the theoretical papers is a discussion of the continuity of thinking from Montaigne through Descartes and Rousseau to Freud, viewed as representing the evolution of Modernism in European culture. Khan argues that Freud "launched the twentieth century with a new humanistic vision, where man's inner reality was as much the concern of the other as his social experience" (p. 40).
Another paper discusses the psychodynamics of the hysteric:
… the hysteric in early childhood deals with the failures of good-enough mothering and care by precocious sexual development. The primitive anxieties and affects generated by the failure of a phase-adequate holding-environment, and the resultant threat to the coherence of the emergent ego, are coped with by intensification, as well as exploitation, of the sexual apparatuses of the body-ego. Hence, from the beginning, a dissociation is established between sexual experience and a creative use of ego-capacities. It is this dissociation and specific technique of coping with excitement and anxiety that gives the hysteric's personality in adult life its peculiar and bizarre sexual character, both in behaviour and symptomatology (p. 52).
Three briefer papers explore specific psychic states, a notion of great importance to Khan's thinking. One is on the "dreaming experience," which for Khan is quite distinct from the content or text of the dream (a concept that seems at least in part to be based upon a misunderstanding of neurophysiologic research on dreaming). The other two are on "lying fallow" (an alert, wakeful, receptive, nonverbal state) and on "infancy, aloneness and madness." Madness for Khan is quite distinct from psychosis and does not seem to be altogether undesirable.
The other five papers revolve around clinical data. The two