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Scandal now surrounds the name of Masud Khan, who died in 1989. For many years he functioned as a powerful leader within the British Psychoanalytical Society; he was known as a favorite disciple of Donald W. Winnicott's; and, in addition, Khan had been politic enough within the British Society to be on good terms with the followers of both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. (Khan had had the foresight to pick them both as supervisors during the final years of his training.) In organizational terms Khan was considered thoroughly “reliable”; he became a key insider within the International Psychoanalytical Association. Then he got cancer, and according to one version of his story, this affliction released sides of Khan that were undreamt of; he had an affair with a patient, which ruined him within the British Society. His final break with his British colleagues came over the anti-Semitic passages contained in The Long Wait; thereafter he ceased even being a member of the British Society. Precisely because previously he had been the author of many and much-admired books and technical papers, Masud Khan's fall from grace was widely known and much lamented.
My own view of matters connected with Khan is different. When I first met him, in 1965, I found him extraordinarily difficult; the word arrogance does not begin to cover the imperiousness of his manner. That he came from an extraordinarily rich Pakistani background did not, in my view,