Family background

Named Ibrahim at birth,^[1] Khan was born in Jhelum in the Punjab, then part of British India, now in Pakistan. His father, Fazaldad (c. 1846-1943), was a Shiite Muslim of peasant birth who had been richly rewarded by the British for the family's support and military service during the conquest of the region, and became a wealthy landowning zamindar, adopting the name "Khan Bahadur Fazaldad Khan". He farmed, specializing in the breeding and sale of horses to the British in the army and for polo. He married four times (his first wife was a cousin, from whom he divorced due to infertility; the third wife died at a fairly young age), and had nine sons and several daughters.

His fourth wife, whom he married when he was 76 and she was claiming to be seventeen, was Khursheed Begum (1905-1971); Masud Khan was ashamed of the marriage because she was an opium-addicted courtesan and "former dancing girl" with an illegitimate son. Khan referred to his father as "normally a cruel and authoritative feudal lord", observing him to be "a gaunt, bleak, monumental presence, either utterly still or raging in wild temper" for whose affection his sons competed and by whom they were disciplined with beatings, Masud, the youngest, was the only one to escape this form of punishment but nevertheless subjected to his father's high expectations and verbal chastisement. Khan, however, never criticized his harsh parenting, observing himself to have been "brought up an indulged child under an iron discipline". The marriage of Fazaldad Khan and Khursheed Begum — considered inappropriate due to his old age — caused friction with Fazaldad's second wife and their eldest son and heir, Akbar, who took her to live with him at Lahore.^[2][3][1]

Early life

Masud Khan was raised with his older brother Tahir and his younger sister Mahmooda on his father's estate in the Montgomery District. They moved to Lyallpur when Khan was 13. He was not allowed to see much of his mother during his early years, but after his father died in 1943, when Khan was 19, he went to live with her. An estrangement between them had arisen in Khan's youth, when she struck him for criticizing her late return from her ancestral home. Khan considered her a simple woman with a tendency to "anxious chatter" and became distant from her as he grew up.^[2][1]

Khan stated that he was groomed as his father's heir from the age of four, accompanying Fazaldad in conducting estate business and watching him preside over the local court. Before this, he commented his father "hardly knew" him. His father's favorite child — Mohammed Baqar, different from his brothers, military men, in being an intellectual — was killed in a motorcycle accident aged 19 when a student at Oxford, the year before Khan's birth. Fazaldad encouraged Khan to "take Baqar's place as the family intellectual".^[1]

University years

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.^[2]: 11

Masud Raza Khan acquired his double Masters in English Literature and Psychology from University of Punjab and in 1946 applied to the British Psychoanalytic Association to be trained as an analyst, at the age of 22. His first training analyst was Ella Sharpe, who died nine months later. He completed his training analysis under John Rickman, and stayed with him in analysis until 1951, the year Rickman died. Khan qualified as an analyst at the age of 26, in 1950; and as a child analyst in 1952 under the supervision of Winnicott. After Rickman's death, Khan went into analysis with Winnicott, which lasted for 15 years until 1966.^[4]

Later life

In his later life Masud Khan's share of his father's vast estate was managed by his mother's illegitimate son Salahuddin ("Salah"; 1914-1979).^[1] In 1956, Masud Khan, his brother Tahir, and their stepbrother Salah, built a cinema, the Rex, in Lyallpur. After the collapse of the Pakistani cinema industry in the 1980s it became the Masud Super Market and Rex Hotel.

He died at his home in London in 1989.

Controversy

Khan's position in the British Psychoanalytical Society as training analyst gave him legitimacy, while at the same time he became less and less adherent to psychoanalytic guidelines with boundary violations including socialising and entering relationships with some of his students and analysands.^[8][9]

He lost his status as training analyst and later resigned from the British Psychoanalytical Society after the publication of his last book When Spring Comes which included a remark about the Yiddish history of psychoanalysis which was deemed anti-semitic .^[10]

In his later years he signed his name as Prince Raja Khan, explaining he had inherited the title from his ancestors.^[9]

Character

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."^[11] He had a slight deformity, a "deformed and oversized" 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.^[12]

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.^[8][9] His paradoxical and highly unpredictable nature was summarised by his close friend and colleague, the French psychoanalyst, Victor Smirnoff, who wrote at his death:

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.^[13]