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Since its inception, psychoanalysis has had a place in the public eye. Its insights and validity have been debated in magazines, newspapers, and journals throughout its more than one-hundred-years of existence. However, individual analysts have not been publicly visible in the same way. One exception is Masud Khan. The general outlines of his life are familiar. Khan was a creative, charismatic-but-troubled analyst who was highly active in the 1960s and 1970s and then had a spectacular downfall. He was married to world-renowned ballerina Svetlana Beriosova and
was friends with Julie Andrews, Michael Redgrave, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He qualified as an analyst in the 1950s and rose to prominence as a member of the British Middle Group in the 1960s with a number of impressive papers gathered into his first book, The Privacy of the Self. Khan was analyzed by John Rickman, Sylvia Payne, and most importantly D. W. Winnicott. After his analysis with Winnicott, Khan became a close collaborator and one of the premier exponents of Winnicott’s work. To my eye, Khan’s first book is as close as we have to a book of the theory of Winnicottian technique.
Khan was very productive through the 1960s and in the 1970s, writing and giving papers, editing books, teaching and supervising, organizing talks, and leading a lively social life. However, as he ascended in the social and professional circles of psychoanalysis some of his personal troubles became evident: Khan frequently lied about his relationships with others; fabricated aspects of his history; exaggerated his social status (he frequently referred to himself as a prince which appears to have been untrue); and used and exploited his friends, patients, and supervisees, sometimes sexually. How long he was allowed to practice and how much of his frank antisociality was tolerated is an unhappy reflection on psychoanalytic organizations in this era.
One possible reason for this tolerance may have been the quality of his writing,