I could write a dozen replies but here's one:
Not knowing of Khan makes sense because he was not only expelled out of British psychoanalysis but mostly erased from its history. From the mid-50s till the mid-70s, though, he was the rock star and enfant terrible of that scene, itself filled with charismatic characters. The story is cinematic, and in the end tragic as he engineered his own destruction.
The biographer, Linda Hopkins, spent years putting the pieces together. She had the fortune of good timing: many of the key players were still alive, but in their twilight years and ready to spill the beans. She earned their trust—the good way, by being trustworthy—and ended up with troves of information, not just about Khan but others in that world, such as Winnicott, for whom Khan had been a substitute son and close editor if not co-author.
Before reading it, I recommend first the essay that Wynne Godley published about Khan in the London Review of Books, a brilliant piece which managed to shock the community as late as 2001, decades after the events he wrote about. The letters following the article are worth reading as well. (Godley's piece is at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n04/wynne-godley/saving-.... This follow-up profile is also worth reading and includes a hilarious anecdote about Khan and Lacan: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robert-s-boynton-retur....)
Hopkins's biography is marvelous in that she includes Khan's dark side but shows him as larger than it. The NYT review began with "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." How's that for a review? The publisher put it on the second edition :)
Langs is an entirely different character but ended up almost as isolated as Khan did. His core insights about unconscious perception and unconscious communication, if true, are enough to change how analysis and therapy should be done. But he communicated them so oppositionally that the field eventually spat him out. That's my sense of it at least. Langs lacked the charisma to inspire much of a following, though he was a gifted if fire-breathing supervisor. His vision of analysis and therapy is so austere that I imagine no one, including Langs, could actually practice it—yet his core claims are so compelling that I don't see how they can be ignored either. He seems to have been dropped because his challenge was too uncomfortable.
Lacan is one I have never been able to understand or relate to. Do you want to suggest an entrypoint?
