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Background music: Tachanka [Tachanka] music: K. Listov, lyrics: M. Ruderman; 1936

  "False Self:The Life of Masud Khan"

by Linda Hopkins

Title: "False Self: The Life of Masud Khan"

Author: Linda Hopkins

Publisher: Other Press

Date of publishing: January 2007

ISBN: 9781590513033

Pages: 525

<<Masud Khan's childhood home was in Montgomery (now Sahiwal), an area in the northwest part of the United Provinces of India known as the Punjab. The land had been conquered by the British in the latter half of the nineteenth century after a savage conflict in which Khan's father and uncles were allied with the British. After the conquest, his family continued to maintain close military ties: of his eight half-brothers, seven would have celebrated careers in the Indian and then the Pakistani army. In the West, Khan claimed, probably accurately, that his was the first generation in which there had not been a murder. He told a friend: "In my country, life is very cheap. I could have men disposed of for a mere five hundred rupees-that is how we might deal with difficult situations. My people do not feel Judeo-Christian guilt: my people feel vengeance."

As an adult, Khan was always aware of the powerful influence of his "savage" Eastern roots. In the West, he wrote:

[I]n all honesty I have to confess that in some deep dark recesses of my soul I am still hankering after an ideal of heroism which is essentially miltaristic, impersonal and political. The taint of my ancestry. The victory of my imaginative-intellectual sentiments is not yet complete over this dark inheritance. [I have an] inner craving for heroic social battle and a dark fascination with war and soldiery.... That is perhaps why I live away from my country. Because in it I will eventually get seduced into action.

Khan's father, Fazaldad, was a Shiite Muslim who was born a peasant. Because of their alliance with the British, he and his two brothers were richly rewarded, acquiring significant power and wealth. An old photograph shows a tall (6'5"), light-skinned, and handsome Fazaldad, proudly wearing military dress that includes two medals around his neck. Family legend has it that he received one of these for his bravery in carrying a wounded British general to safety in a battle in Mesopotamia.

After the British conquest, Fazaldad's name changed to Khan Bahadur Fazaldad Khan. "Khan" and "Bahadur" are terms of respect for people with power, not family names, and indeed Punjabis did not use family names until after the British came. Fazaldad's descendants use Khan as their last name and it is a name that has become common in Pakistan. This group of Khans, however, is no ordinary family. The wealth accumulated by Fazaldad has been passed on to members of a large extended family, and his landholdings in several different locations in Pakistan, including Chakwal and Faisalabad (formerly Lyallpur), are still held by family members.

As the Punjab settled into peacetime, Fazaldad switched from being a warrior to being a farmer. He specialized in breeding and selling horses that the British used in their army and for polo, and he became a self-taught horse veterinarian. He made his home in the remote countryside of Montgomery and he also owned land in other parts of Northern India. The social system was feudal, and the peasants who lived on his land were required to work for him.

Fazaldad, by the custom of his religion, was free to marry four times, and he did so. His initial marriage was to a first cousin, as was common. When she was unable to bear children, there was a divorce.

His second wife, Badsha (d. 1955), was a Muslim from the Pathan tribe, a fair-skinned group that includes Hindus as well as Muslims. The couple had eight children together, four sons and four daughters. As a Pathan, Badsha did not share the Rajput tradition of contempt for females, and she made sure that her daughters were educated, albeit secretly. These daughters then encouraged their own daughters to be educated. Masud was especially close to Badsha's granddaughters Khalida Khan and Fatima Ahmed, who were his age. "Uncle" Masud and his "nieces" played together as children and attended university together. These two women, both professionals living in the United States, are major sources of information about Khan's early life.

Amir Jan, Fazaldad's third wife, was a courtesan who came to the marriage having already borne an illegitimate daughter. Fazaldad had started the relationship with her while Badsha, who was pregnant, was making an extended visit to her family. Badsha accepted Fazaldad's new wife, even as the two women had children in overlapping years, and Amir Jan's illegitimate daughter was allowed to stay with the family in a kind of nursemaid role. Amir Jan had four children, all sons, with Fazaldad. She died in the 1920s at a young age and Badsha then raised the sons.

Fazaldad's fourth marriage took place in 1923, when he was seventy-six years old-an age the family considered to be inappropriate for infatuation and sexuality. The new bride, Khursheed, was a dark-skinned beauty, and, like Amir Jan, she was a courtesan with an illegitimate child. She claimed to be seventeen, an age considered to be the peak of beauty and sensuality for Punjabi girls, although she was probably a few years older.

After the marriage, Fazaldad insisted that Khursheed's illegitimate son Salahuddin ("Salah," 1914-1979) be sent away. Salah went to live with Khursheed's brother in Jhelum, a town about 100 miles north of her new home. Khursheed had grown up in Jhelum, and her extended family still lived there. She would visit Salah every year, always traveling alone.

This marriage upset the family balance. Fazaldad's oldest son, Akbar, took Badsha to live with him in Lahore, eighty-five miles away, an act that broke with the tradition of multiple wives and their children living together on the patriarch's land.

Khursheed and Fazaldad had three children in quick succession: Tahir (1923-1983), Masud (1924-1989), and Mahmooda (1926-1942). Masud was born in Jhelum, at his mother's family home, on July 21, 1924. He was born with a defect known as an "elephant ear" or "cauliflower ear." It was a deformed and oversized right ear, and it would remain a stigma all his life.

Khan wrote about his childhood: "[L]ife was gloriously feudally phobic. Everything was really simple. No one travelled far or left. Relationships were direct and simple, even though often very violent. No one ever used boats, and planes were science-fiction to us. One's farthest reaches were limited by the abilities and capacities of a horse." As a toddler, he was adored by the servants: "I lived in a benignly autistic stance, closely and warmly environed by the servants. I was perpetually in their care & respected with deep affection in their holding presence." But he was not a peaceful child. Chaudri Nazir Ahmed, whose father Mustaq Ahmed had been estate manager when Khan was young, reports that "from the very beginning" Khan was overly talkative. In a contrasting account, an anonymous friend remembers Khan saying that, as a boy, "he was autistic, enclosed in himself-he felt he existed in the midst of nothingness and he never fit in."

It appears that Khursheed devoted herself to her new husband. She regularly stayed in her bedroom until around 4 p.m., at which time she would emerge exquisitely made up and dressed with bracelets and jewels. Late in my research, I learned that there was a family secret: Khursheed may have been addicted to opium. This would explain her late rising and her remoteness. Fazaldad apparently had a secret bank account that was used to buy the illegal opium, and upon his death the bank account (and the responsibility) was transferred to Masud.

As adults, Masud and Tahir joked about hearing their parents make love on hot nights, when the whole family would sleep outside on the terrace; they remembered their parents as having had a romantic sexual relationship. But the marriage was, from the perspective of others, tainted by Khursheed's history. One of Khan's Indian/Pakistani friends told me: "I think that when Masud was young, he was probably taunted for being the son of a courtesan. I mean, it was better that his parents were married, but it was still very bad. So that experience went into his soul and he carried not only a chip on his shoulder-he carried a rock."

Despite his mother's relative absence, Khan was close to her: "It was in my mother's ambience and sentient presence in my early childhood that I evolved my sensibility." According to Khalida Khan, Khursheed had a gentle disposition and rarely showed negative emotions. Masud was acutely sensitive to his mother's feelings and two early traumatic experiences had a huge effect on him. The first occurred when he was four years old:

Living has never been natural to me, since I saw my mother in an epileptic seizure, at the age of tour, convulsed, with a pathetic local doctor convinced she was going to die. She had just been delivered of a stillborn foetus. I stood crying and praying by her. Maids wanted to take me away, but I refused, and my father, normally a cruel and authoritative feudalist lord, ordered I be allowed to stay.

My mother recovered. I do not remember the rest. But the gossip by the maids and sisters was that for three years I did not speak.

One wonders why Fazaldad would have allowed his son to witness such a scene. The fact that Masud developed the symptom of mutism afterward shows that it was overwhelming to him.

The second traumatic experience occurred when he was seven, when Khursheed went to visit her parents and Salah:

This time, my mother betrayed a promise to me. She was going to ... Jhelum and she promised to return in thirty, days. My father didn't believe that she would return when she said she would, but she made me her accomplice in believing her, and I convinced my father. On the twenty-ninth day, a telegram arrived, and she was delayed for fifteen more days. My mammoth and majestic father raved in panic like a child. For fifteen days he made the whole estate a living hell of barbarous cruelty, maudlin self-pity, and abusive threats of vengeance against my mother and her family. "I shall kill, kill, kill," he kept shouting and whimpering. Mother did arrive on the fifteenth day. [But] I refused to drive to the railway station to receive her. When she reached the mansion, she sent for me. I went, but refused to greet her: very insolent indeed. She said, "You have not greeted me." In the most lucid Urdu, I replied: "You have dishonoured my father and let me down." She slapped my face-she, who had never slapped me, ever! I quietly said, "I will never speak to you again, unless you ask for me and order me." I never did, to her dying day>>.

        Book's Review written by Amy Bloom and published in "International Herald Tribune" (January, 19, 2007)

<<If I were a snob, a liar, a drunk, a philanderer, an anti-Semite, a violent bully, a poseur and a menace to the vulnerable, I would want Linda Hopkins to write my biography.

Masud Khan, an Anglo-Pakistani psychoanalyst notable in the 1960s and '70s, was all of those things. Hopkins, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, has written the story of his life with the kind of generous forgiveness, insistent evenhandedness, patient understanding and restrained judgment one might hope for in a very good analyst of a certain kind, or a wise, exceptionally forbearing and insightful mother.

She sees his life as a tragedy, lived "on a scale grand enough to match ? his favorite characters: Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin." Khan also identified with Dostoyevsky himself and was particularly pleased when one of his later girlfriends showed signs (briefly) of living up to the high benchmark of Anna Dostoyevsky's devotion ("so robust and militant in her loving regard for her husband's nobility of soul," as he put it).

 

Hopkins describes Khan's Dostoyevsky delusion as she does his lies about being a Pakistani prince; his drunken rages; his sleeping with patients, with patients' wives and with the daughters of friends - always more in sorrow than in anger, and with the reminder that Khan may well have suffered from a bipolar disorder. Hopkins faults the psychoanalytic community for not saving him in the face of what may have been illness and was indisputably bad behavior and poor judgment: "His former analy-sands provided him with the care that should have been provided by an extended family or others from Khan's private life, but Khan had nobody to do that for him," she writes. Surprisingly, she does not ask, Why not? And she does not say, How selfish and unprofessional that he should put that burden on his patients.

Most Americans don't know who Masud Khan was. Most psychotherapists don't know who Masud Khan was, unless they have studied the work of D.W. Winnicott, the great English pediatrician, child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who died in 1971. (If you ever went back to the playground after dark to retrieve your toddler's blankie, you have successfully incorporated Clare and Donald Winnicott's notion of the necessary "transitional object"; if you have thought that it's just as important to learn how to say no in a firm, clear way as to say yes, you have absorbed Winnicott's concept of "the good enough mother.") Khan was one of Winnicott's disciples, co-author of some significant works and his editor - as well as one of his patients.

This seems like a bad idea to those of us who like our therapists from the old school: in their office, in their chair, not chatting on about their own private lives, not having sex with us, not socializing with us, not gossiping about other patients (which might be great, except for the possibility that they gossip about us too, or like the others better). But, as a number of writers, including Hopkins, have pointed out, Khan learned about boundary jumping from his elders. Anna Freud was analyzed by her own father. Melanie Klein analyzed her son, Eric, then handed him over to Winnicott for treatment, supervising that analysis and praising Winnicott for his skill in concealing all this from him. Winnicott himself, it turns out, interrupted Khan's sessions with his patients to chat and gossip - sometimes about those patients.

Masud Khan, born in the Punjab in 1924, came to Oxford to study Modern Greats. He became an analyst and then, after three attempts, a training analyst. He married not one but two beautiful ballerinas and, through his second wife, became friendly with Julie Andrews, Mike Nichols and the Redgraves. He was dashing and boldly self-promoting in a professional community in which those things were rare. Before his death in 1989, Khan wrote two very good and interesting books, "The Privacy of the Self" (1974) and "Alienation in Perversions" (1979); one interesting book, "Hidden Selves" (1983); and one disaster, "The Long Wait" (1988), in which the occasional insight breaks through a sea of rambling prose and anti-Semitic goofiness ("I was freeing myself of the rigid Yiddish shackles of the so-called psychoanalysis"). His warmth, intuition and maverick style helped some patients: a number spoke up on his behalf at the end of his life, when he was investigated and finally expelled by the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and spoke warmly of him in long interviews with Hopkins. Several women asserted that he had been a brilliant if unorthodox psychoanalyst, although some did remark that it had not been therapeutically helpful for Khan to have initiated sexual relationships with them.

"If I had been less ill, and he more sound, it might have been wonderful," one said. Hopkins, in her non-judgmental way, writes of this analysand only that it is "easy to assume she must be in denial about the harm done to her by Khan, but it is perhaps more honest to grope with the possibility that there may be some validity to her subjective experience." It seems to me that it is not only his patients but his admirers, including his biographer, who may be struggling with some denial about the harm done by an alcoholic married analyst who initiated sex with female patients, encouraged affairs between patients, threatened patients who terminated treatment and abandoned those who did not meet his own emotional needs.

Khan began to fall apart in the early '70s, after his mother and Winnicott died within months of each other. And his spectacularly erratic behavior - once, in a restaurant, he sent a piece of cake to an obese diner and shouted, "So that you might die sooner!" - set the stage for what now seems his greatest legacy: a complete and long overdue change in the training and ethical standards for English psychoanalysts. Hopkins persuades me that Masud Khan was fascinating at a dinner party (unless there was too much wine), interesting as a thinker, given to the occasional brilliant intuitive flash, handsome as the devil and twice as charming. But she does not persuade me that English bigotry brought about his downfall (though as for whatever schadenfreude followed it, I certainly believe that there were some English psychoanalysts "somewhat acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions," as P.G.Wodehouse put it). She does persuade me that this is a sad story of a talented man, that Khan's own emotional troubles made him at first gifted in treating difficult patients, and later, incapable of being anything else. As one former analysand wrote in 2000, "somebody could write a tragicomic account of this." Hopkins's biography is thoughtful, thorough and insightful. But I never felt the tragedy she asserts, and only Bruce Jay Friedman or Iris Murdoch could have done justice to the other>>.