“An Irish emigrant the wrong way out”: Masud Khan reads James Joyce

Abstract

Masud Khan was one of the most controversial figures of British psychoanalysis. His psychoanalytic writing is heavily populated by European and Anglophone modernist writers and thinkers. Khan’s life and writing sit at the confluence of major historical forces and cultural movements: the Partition of India in 1947; the canonization of modernist culture in Europe in the postwar period; mass migration of non-white, former colonial subjects to Britain. Joyce’s writing, I will argue, shapes key concepts in Khan’s psychoanalytic thought. Joyce provides Khan the basis of his ‘epiphanic’ psychoanalysis, but also offers Khan a highly suggestive notion of exile that becomes key to his conception, not only of the self, but also of his own life as an émigré.