False Self: The Life of Masud Khan [Paperback]

Notorious for his flamboyant personality and, at first, widely acknowledged as a brilliant clinician, M. Masud R. Khan (1924-1989) exposed through his candor and scandalous behaviour the bigotry of his proponents-turned-detractors. The son of a wealthy landowner in rural India (now Pakistan), Khan grew up in a world of privilege radically different from the Western lifestyle he would adopt after moving to London, where we was closely connected to some of the most creative and accomplished people of his time, including Donald Woods Winnicott, Anna Freud, Robert Stoller, Richard Redgrave, Julie Andrews, Rudolph Nureyev, and many more. Khan's subsequent downfall reveals not only his psychic fragility but also the world of intrigues and deceptions in the psychoanalytic community of the time. In telling the story of this provocative man, Linda Hopkins makes use of unprecedented access to Khan's peers, relatives, and analysands in order to provide an in-depth and balanced account of Masud Khan as a talented and deeply conflicted man. This scholarly, lucid book offers a balanced view of Khan's rich and extremely problematic life and work. Linda Hopkins has done a masterful job of investigating the complexities of history and psychology. Joyce Slochower, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., author of Holding and Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Collisions 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 was all of these things. ... [Hopkins] sees his life as a tragedy lived on a scale grand enough to match his favorite characters: Shakespeare's King Lear and Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin. Amy Bloom, The New York Times Review of Books Sensible, intelligent, scrupulously researched, and clear as a bell. This is an important biography, for its reference points are the relevance and standing of psychoanalysis in today's world, the crossroads between Western lÃ/