Masud Khan

Mohammed Masud Raza Khan (21 July 1924 – June 1989) was a Pakistani British psychoanalyst. His training analyst was Donald Winnicott. Masud Raza Khan was a protege of Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna and a long-time collaborator with the most famous child analyst of the 20th century, D. W. Winnicott. Indeed, Anna Freud insisted that Khan understood her father's work better than anyone else and spoke in defence of her star student whenever he aroused the Society's ire.

Early life

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Khan was born in Jhelum in the Punjab district of British India, in what became Pakistan, to Raja Fazaldad Khan and his fourth wife, Khursheed Begum. He was a wealthy landowner, and she a beautiful.[1] According to the family Kursheed Bagam was married to a "Peer Syed Jumla Shah" of village Kotayan Sherif Jhelum. She was married at a very young age and her husband died after few short years. Masud Raza Khan's mother had two children with Syed Jumala Shah and later she married Raja Fazaldad Khan.

His father Sirdar (or Sardar) Khan Bahadur, Raja Fazal Dad Khan, a Minhas Rajput, was a hereditary Landlord (or Zamindar) and was commissioned with a British Army cavalry unit. British government honoured him with vast lands where he later formed 3 estates. All of his states (Montgomery, Chakwal and Lyallpur) were later divided among his 9 sons.

Khan Bahdur Fazal Dad Khan married 4 times and had 9 sons of those, six joined the Army and became officers. Masud's eldest brother, Muhammed Akbar Khan was the first Indian Muslim to become a General in the British Indian Army and later most senior general of Pakistan Army. His brother, General Muhammad Anwar Khan was the first Engineer in Chief of the Pakistan Army and his brother Major General Muhammed Iftikhar Khan was an officer inherited by the Pakistan Army from British India. He had been nominated to become the first local Commander in Chief of the Pakistan Army after General Douglas David Gracey's retirement. However, his death in a tragic plane crash in 1949 was a disaster for the newly formed country.

Masud Khan's mother Kursheed Bagam bore 3 kids with Raja Fazaldad Khan. Masud Khan was raised with his older brother, Tahir, and his younger sister, Mahmooda, in the Montgomery District on his father's estate, moving to Lyallpur when Khan was 13. He was not allowed to see much of his mother, though when his father died in 1943 when Khan was 19, he went to live with her.[1]

According to the family, Masud Khan's mother wanted to bring her children from previous marriage to Lyallpur estate which his father didn't agree. Masud Khan and his sibling were moved by their father's to Montgomery estate to punish him mother by a feudal landlord with terrible temper.

In his later life, Masud Khan's estate was managed by his step brother Syed Salah ud Din a.k.a. Raja Salah who was also an executor for the family estate at 222 RB commonly known as Kot Raja Fazaldad Khan(Nawabwala)Faisalabad. In 1956, Masud Khan with his brother, Tahir and Raja Salah built a cinema under the name "REX" in Lyallpur. After the fall of Pakistani cinema industry in the 1980s, it was later changed into "Masud Super Market and Rex Hotel".

In his own words

"I am tall, handsome, a good polo and squash player. Fit. Only forty one. Very rich. Nobel born. Delightfully married to a famous artist. Live in the style of my own making. I am a Muslim and Pakistani. My roots are sunk deep and widespread across three cultures."

Khan wrote in his Work Books that he inherited his shyness, sensitivity, and warmth from his mother, and from his father, an "imperious capacity for work and a terrible temper."[2] He had a slight deformity, a right ear that stuck out, of which he was very conscious, later taking to wearing a beret to hide it, until Winnicott persuaded him to have it fixed in 1951.[1]

Education

Khan attended the University of Punjab at Faisalabad and Lahore from 1942–5. He obtained his BA in English literature, and his MA for a thesis on James Joyce's Ulysses.[3]

Masud Raza Khan acquired his double Masters in English Literature and Psychology from University of Punjab and later applied to the British Psychoanalytic Association to be accepted as an analyst. Later Masud Raza Khan became a legend in British and International Psychoanalyst community for his literary and analytical work.

Contributions to psychoanalysis

Khan had been one of psychoanalysis's best and brightest – he was a protege of Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna and a long-time collaborator with the most famous child analyst of the 20th century, D. W. Winnicott. Indeed, Anna Freud insisted that Khan understood her father's work better than anyone else and spoke in defence of her star pupil whenever he aroused the Society's ire.

Few psychoanalysts from the latter half of the twentieth century have been as intellectually prolific, charismatic and ultimately scandalous as Masud Khan. Clinical practice and teaching went alongside his authoring over 60 published papers, as well as numerous reviews, and editing significant portions of Winnicott's literary output and that of other key luminaries within the psychoanalytical canon.

Masud Khan was both highly controversial as well as a significant contributor to psychoanalytic thinking, functioning as editor of psychoanalytical publications as well as contributing via his own writings. His contributions include the concept of cumulative trauma as creating psychopathology introducing the concept of lack of fit between child and parent creating an ongoing trauma affecting development. He produced a number of papers highlighting perversions as stemming from a split within the personality and the acting out of disturbed object relations collected in his book "Alienation in Perversions." He wrote a significant sequence of three papers on the use of dreams in psychoanalysis as well as a series of clinical papers showing his unique intuitive style combined with his application of Winnicott's then new concepts of potential space and transitional object in the analysis of adult patients. Khan demonstrates the importance of influencing the patient's environment outside of the analytic setting in line with Winnicott's emphasis on the environment as a therapeutic tool.

Controversy

Khan's position in the British Psychoanalytic association as training analyst gave him an air of legitimacy while at the same time he became less and less adherent to psychoanalytic guidelines with gross boundary violations including socialising with his students and analysands.[4][5]

He lost his status as training analyst and later resigned from the British Psychoanalytic Association after the publication of his last book "When Spring Comes" in which he included a blatantly anti-semitic tirade against a Jewish patient.[6] Masud Khan however insisted that his remarks were therapeutic in nature.

In his later years he insisted on being called Prince Raja Khan and signed letters in this way, claiming to have inherited the title from his Pakistani ancestors, however, this claim was never substantiated.[5]

Quoting Jeffrey Masson: Khan about British psychoanalysis

“ Khan told me: "Nobody wants to say anything publicly because I know too much about all of them. If we were all to be honest with each other, that would be the end of British psychoanalysis." ”

[7]

Personal life

Khan was married initially to the dancer Jane Shore whom he later divorced and married well known ballerina Svetlana Beriosova.[4][5] Together with Beriosova he led a prominent social life and was present in a London scene which included well known figures such as actress Julie Andrews, photographer Zoë Dominic, actor Peter O'Toole and members of the Redgrave family.[4] Khan was described as tall, handsome with oriental charm and sex appeal, he was known as charming, charismatic and infamous for impromptu flashes of psychoanalytic insights given randomly to people met at social occasions.[4][5] His paradoxical and highly unpredictable nature was summarised by his close friend and colleague, the French psychoanalyst, Victor Smirnoff, who wrote at his death:[8]

“ "Certainly was an unusual man: gifted, beautiful, rich, intelligent. But he was also cunning, boastful, narcissistic, stingy prejudiced and cruel. He was a strange, talented, sometimes disquieting analyst. But he had style, taste and flair. And he was a faithful friend. Requiescat in pace." ”

Masud Khan married twice and bore no children. The only family that he knew was his mother, brother Tahir, brother Salah and Salah's children. While living in England, he often spent his vacation visiting his mother and step brother Raja Salah on his estate in Faisalabad. He spent his vacations trying to get a "family life" that he missed in the UK. He was very close to his nephews Ali Raza, Mahmood Raza, Mohsin Raza and his three nieces. Masud Raza Khan died in peace in his home in London in the year 1989.

Bibliography

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Cooper, Judy. Speak of me as I am. Karnac Books, 1993, pp. 5–7.
  2. ↑ Khan, Masud. Work Books, 1971, p. 928 cited in Cooper, Judy. Speak of me as I am. Karnac Books, 1993, p. 8.
  3. ↑ Cooper, Judy. Speak of me as I am. Karnac Books, 1993, p. 11.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Linda Hopkins, FALSE SELF – The Life of Masud Khan, New York: Other Press, 2006
  5. 1 2 3 4 Roger Willoughby (Author), Pearl King (Foreword): Masud Khan: The Myth And The Reality, Publisher: Free Association Books; 1 edition (January 2005), ISBN 978-1-85343-724-3
  6. ↑ Masud Khan When Spring Comes: Awakenings in Clinical Psychoanalysis, Publisher: Chatto and Windus, London 1988 ISBN 978-0-7011-3315-3
  7. ↑ Quoting Khan according to Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson in FINAL ANALYSIS (1990), pp. 194–195
  8. ↑ Communication Victor Smirnoff to Robert Stoller quoted in: Roger Willoughby (Author), Pearl King (Foreword): Masud Khan: The Myth And The Reality, Publisher: Free Association Books; 1 edition (January 2005), ISBN 978-1-85343-724-3

References

External links

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