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This article concerns Masud Khan and Donald Winnicott, both major innovative psychoanalytic thinkers, particularly their intricate personal and professional affiliation, which included Khan being in analysis with Winnicott for 15 years, and will attempt to add further understanding as to why this transaction proved to be so disruptive for Khan.
Khan was born in what is now Pakistan on July 24, 1924, the second of three children of a wealthy 78-year-old father and a much younger mother, who had been a courtesan (Cooper, 1993). In 1942, his sister, Mahmooda, 2 years younger, died from tuberculosis, and the next year, his father, for whom he was the preferred child and had helped with the management of his estates. Mourning being such an overwhelming task during adolescence, Masud was severely depressed and dropped out of school temporarily (Wolfenstein, 1966). In one of his later work books, he wrote: “I can vividly recall that I had this wholeness up to 1943 and after my father's death it and I got splintered off and lost to each other” (Cooper, 1993, p. 9).
Khan attended the University of the Punjab from 1942 to 1945, obtaining a BA in political science and an MA in literature. His master's thesis on James Joyce's Ulysses was deemed outstanding (Cooper, 1993, p. 11). From 1943 to 1946, he was in five-times-a-week psychotherapy with an American-trained psychologist, at whose urging he successfully applied to be a candidate at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, after submitting a letter of inquiry on May 6, 1946. He began a training analysis in October with Ella Freeman Sharpe, who had been an English professor and Shakespearean scholar before she became