Mohammed Masud Raza Khan (21 July 1924 – 7 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 Freud, and a long-time collaborator with Donald Winnicott.
Biography
Early life
Named Ibrahim at birth, 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.
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 had reassured his father, who doubted her, that she would return within thirty days as she had stated, but she remained for fifteen days beyond that date, incurring her husband's fury and anxiety. On her return, Khan refused to greet her; when challenged, he replied to his mother that she had dishonoured her husband and let her son down, and was slapped in the face in response. Although Khan records that "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", this does not appear to have been entirely true; nevertheless, he considered her a simple woman with a tendency to "anxious chatter" and became distant from her as he grew up.
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. When asked by his mother and governess what he would ask from his father as a birthday gift, Khan replied "four million rupees"; on being persuaded by them to ask for less, when his father asked him he requested "a penny", which amused Fazaldad. Khan claimed that at the age of thirteen, his father handed over his estate, saying ""All this goes to you because you were content with a penny." This developing relationship between father and son was marked by the change of Khan's name from Ibrahim to Mohammed. Several older brothers had the latter as a first name. In particular his father's deceased favourite 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".
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.