ABSTRACT
In The Extensions of psychoanalysis: colonialism, post-colonialism and hospitality, Julia Borossa questions the extensibility of psychoanalysis with respect to its professional remit, while posing the questions, “Who is psychoanalysis’ other?”, “Whom does it exclude?” Reflecting on the intractable kernel of resistance within the analyst as well as the analysand, Freud concluded in 1937 that psychoanalysis is an impossible profession, its aims always proving to be too ambitious or not sufficiently so. With the creation of the first training institutes, when psychoanalysis crystallised into a transmissible body of work, the insight into and acceptance of this failure may be seen to have been buried. In discussing Moses and Monotheism (Freud, 1939a), Edward Said picks up the Freudian theme of the foreign, Egyptian Moses, and challenges psychoanalysis to be hospitable to what it has been blind to: the culturally and racially other. He calls attention to the text’s inherent notion of identity “as a troubling, disabling, destabilising secular wound […] from which there can be no recovery” (Said, 2002, p. 54). This wound, it is argued, marks the beginning of the possibility of inclusion. To question how race and cultural otherness act as “irritants and supplements” to psychoanalysis, Borossa examines the story of the British analyst Masud Khan, a dark-skinned foreigner, born in pre-partition India
and trained in London in the late 1940s. A charismatic, handsome, and wealthy South Asian émigré originally from the Punjab, Masud Khan came to Britain in 1946 and trained with Ella Sharpe, John Rickman, and, most extensively, Winnicott. He lived and worked in London for about forty years and published four books and numerous articles as well as editing Winnicott’s writings and serving as a valued editor of the New Psychoanalytic Library.
