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Psychoanalysis, like any other field, has had its share of masters, mavericks, and madmen. Troubled and troubling individuals have caused ripples of professional unease—while at the same time making memorable contributions to the field. While the list of such contributors to psychoanalysis is long, none stands out more than the literate, enigmatic, provocative, corrupt, and maddening Masud Khan. The subject of three biographies, many papers, and considerable news media coverage, Khan challenges our containing capacities to the fullest. He rose to great professional prominence and then descended into a life of drunken torpor, anti-Semitic rants, and moral depravity.
In the beginning, Khan's conceptualizations were poetic, his clinical work intriguing, and his prose disarmingly elegant. He made “imaginative contributions to psychoanalytic theory” (Sandler 2004, p. 33). However, with the passage of time, this began to deteriorate. What was radiantly innovative became distressingly outrageous. Khan succumbed to the physical and emotional ailments he had long struggled with, leading him to behave in grossly unethical ways and to make Draconian errors of moral judgment.
All this captures our attention. We are shocked, finding it difficult to comprehend that someone who made profound contributions to our field was so disturbed. To the gory details of Khan's dark side, we respond with a combination of personal discomfort, moral outrage, sexual titillation, sadistic glee, gossip in hushed tones, self-righteousness, and a vague fear of bad things happening. There is also a sense of relief that the trouble is out there somewhere away from us, and that we are above it all. Nonetheless,