How do you solve a problem like Masud Khan? He is often referred to, almost coyly, as a divisive or controversial figure in the history of psychoanalysis. The mere evocation of Khan, who died in 1989, has been known to come with grave warnings to curious analysts. Salmar Aktar in 2007 advised that ‘a combination of moralizing euphoria, vicarious instinctual gratification, deep anxieties about our own training analysts and supervisors, and pervasive cultural unfamiliarity blocks our way to a rational consideration of an irrational man.‘1
However, those who do engage with the stories and biography of Khan tend to take up one of three positions:
Trying to understand where a promising analyst went awry. This may include an attempt at secondhand analysis, diagnosis or charting a distinctive trajectory from brilliant and compelling outsider to exile and an ignominious end.
Condemning Khan as typifying analytic privilege and unethical practice, to be used as a salutary lesson. These accounts sometimes speculate as to what could have ‘saved’ Khan or which allies and analysts are also culpable in his downfall and the harms inflicted on his patients and associates.
Finding an uneasy compromise, and salvaging aspects of his writings, brio or legacy. To do so often requires either dwelling on Khan as enigmatic and unfathomable, or turning him into an irreconcilable multiplicity. As Pearl King is quoted saying in Brett Khar's foreword to the Work Books, ‘There's more than one Masud.’
All of this is to say that for the last two decades, especially since the publication of Wynne Godley's account of his analysis with Khan,2 it takes a degree of fascination to overcome the potential opprobrium of the subject enough to consider his life in depth. This is the case with the Diary of a
Fallen Psychoanalyst, which embarks on this venture, bringing his previously unpublished work books into circulation. Evidently, of course, whether because or in spite of the lure of vicarious gratification, many do feel this pull as the Work Books are part of a growing field of research, articles and responses which introduce, nuance and, in various ways, extend the myth of Khan as a troubling and compelling psychoanalyst and public personality. Building on the monumental effort already involved in the biography False Self: The Life of Masud Khan,3 Linda Hopkins, joined by Stephen Kuchuck, has curated the first part of a work by Khan which, in its entirety, runs to over 4000 pages and 39 volumes.
Although the content is itself compelling in a variety of ways, it is also worth dwelling on some of the difficulties which had to be surmounted to get the Work Books published to begin with. In the generous Foreword, Preface and Note to the Reader, which are all important to gain an orientation to this text, we learn that extended legal wrangles over copyright, the scrutiny of three designated readers from the IPA who ensured patient material wasn't published, and the destruction in a fire of the original copy of the work books and remaining Khan archive, all conspired nearly to prevent the Work Books coming into public circulation. It is a testament to the endurance and tenacity of Hopkins and Kuchuck that the book was printed at all in the face of ‘serious attempts to block publication’.
What has been salvaged is something of an uncanny document, safeguarded for years in the trust of the Stoller family, to whom Khan was close. As a reader, it is sometimes difficult to discern what the exact purpose of the Work Books are, or were thought to be – and applying the term diary is perhaps a misnomer. Scrupulously, there is very limited patient material, so the text doesn't give the reader a more finegrained account of Khan's clinical work. Nor is it particularly candid about the everyday aspects of Khan's life or relationships – which is best represented through his various biographies. More accurately, the Work Books, especially the slice of time in the first instalment from 1967 to 1972, which Khan would have begun in his early forties, act as a kind of experiment in extended Bildungsroman in the high modernist, epiphanic style of James Joyce. This is no accident: Joyce is an author who had a
profound influence on Khan from his youth, and on whom Khan wrote his thesis.4 And, as with Joyce, Khan's juxtapositions can be startling, illuminating, and entertaining. Take, for example, two early entries which condense many aspects of the character Khan is constructing from the raw material of his life:
30th April 1968
Hogarth has sent me Rycroft's Imagination and Reality. My introduction is lucid and impressive. How I have dodged my own authority. Even here I got Sutherland to sign as co-author, though he didn't write a single word of it.
8th May 1968
Bought a horse ‘Solo’ and resolved to finish my book on perversions.
Here we are introduced to some of the themes and repeated preoccupations of the Work Books. A demonstration that Khan is steeped in the heart of psychoanalytic publications and literature, a self-evaluation which is often grounded in his struggle with recognition and a sense of overexposure, side swipes and grudges, and casual ostentation that reminds the reader that Khan is set apart from them in grandeur and scale. Other themes that recur include thoughtful meditations on being from a ‘feudal’ environment and more reactive anti-American and reductive Nietzschean anti-democratic sentiment.
From here it's quite possible for the Work Books to be read in the fashion of a ‘choose your own adventure’. If the reader wants to feel invited into the hermetic world of the lives and careers of luminary psychoanalysts, they can be. They can also learn more about Khan's reflections on politics, art, and history, or his portrayals of his famous friends and associates such as the Redgraves, Julie Andrews, or Cartier Bresson.
For those of a more theoretical bent, there are at least two other interesting avenues. The first is tracing the connections between the anglophone and French analytic milieux, which Khan bridged in a compelling manner. Rarely is it possible to study so concretely the
conditions for the transmission of ideas which circulated between analysts such as Lacan, Green, and Winnicott via the transmission of Khan and Pontalis. The second is Khan's ability to vividly clarify, encapsulate, and coin analytic concepts – many of which are still in use today. For example, he neatly summarises the principal difference between Freud and Winnicott: ‘DWW considers paradox as the essential human reality. For Freud, resolution of conflict constituted the aim of therapeutic effort, and for DWW it is the realization of paradox without its resolution that constitutes psychic health and creativity.’5 Or on the importance of imprecision in interpretation: ‘our language has to be metaphoric and not exact. It must leave room for the other to augment and implement it into personal knowledge.’6
Whatever else they are, the Work Books are also a testament to a life of self-aestheticisation. And by starting with the mid-life of Khan they offer a way of encountering a life documented in the thick of things, bracketed by auspicious beginnings and uncomfortable conclusions. Given this, and borrowing from Boris Groys' Becoming An Artwork, the creation and publication of the Work Books also lend themselves to a demonstration that we have a limited range of technologies and techniques used to create an afterlife – but whatever we leave to posterity is open to vicissitudes which take little account of our own desires about how we would like to be remembered or immortalised.7 As I was dwelling on this thought, and the attempts we make to present ourselves to our imagined audiences, I was informed by a Karnac newsletter that it's ‘Masud Khan's 99th Birthday!‘
When we die, perhaps leaving traces of our hopes, pettiness, strangeness, and brilliance, we might wish for a curator as thorough and careful as Hopkins. Through her biography and with Kuchuck in the first instalment of the Work Books, she has done more than most to keep different aspects of Masud Khan alive for others to have a chance to be fascinated too.
Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst: The Work Books of Masud Khan 1967–1972, edited by and , is published by Karnac (2022), ISBN 9781913494650.
(2007) Four roadblocks in approaching Masud Khan, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76(3): 991–5.
(2001) Saving Masud Khan, London Review of Books 23(4), (accessed January 2024).
(2008) False Self: The Life of Masud Khan. London: Karnac.
(2014) ‘An Irish emigrant the wrong way out’: Masud Khan Reads James Joyce, Postcolonial Text 9(4), (accessed January 2024).
Entry: 16th July, 1970.
Entry: 25th February, 1970.
(2022) Becoming an Artwork, London: Polity: ‘So the problem is not immortality as such, but the way in which immortality happens to us, what kind of immortality we want and how we try and take control of the production of afterlife’ (p. 114).