The Return of the Repressed: The Strange Case of Masud Khan

In February 2001 the psychoanalytic world was shaken by a London Review of Books article by Wynne Godley [which I sent around to every colleague I could think of — FmH], visiting scholar at Bard College’s Levi Economics Institute, professor emeritus of applied economics at Cambridge University, and onetime member of H.M. Treasury Panel of Independent Forecasters (the so-called Six Wise Men). “Saving Masud Khan” tells the story of Godley’s lengthy psychoanalysis with Mohammed Masud Raza Khan, the charismatic Anglo-Pakistani who—it was recently revealed—slept with and abused many of his patients. In Godley’s telling, he was essentially tortured by Khan from beginning to end. It was a “long and fruitless battle culminating in a spiral of degradation.”

(…)The professional reaction to Godley’s revelations has been swift and defensive. While it is no secret that equally serious violations of the professional boundary between analyst and patient plague analysis today, there remains the damning fact in his case that many of Khan’s contemporaries—the venerable Winnicott included—knew of his infractions at the time he was committing them but did nothing. “This is like a return to the days of Freud and the earliest psychoanalytic pioneers. Everything is being criticized and re-evaluated here, everything is up for grabs,” says Gregorio Kohon, an animated Argentine émigré and senior member of London’s Institute of Psycho-Analysis who studied with Khan in the early 1970s. “Every family has secrets. And what we are witnessing in the ‘family’ of psychoanalysis is nothing less than ‘the return of the repressed.’” Kohon suggests that the present purging of the tradition may be the first steps of a return to the original promise of psychoanalysis. Boston Review