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A Life at the Crossroads
A biography of Masud Khan could not come at a more timely moment. Here is a man whose persona is situated at the intersection of many critical crossroads. One involves the culture wars between the East and the West. Another is the internecine
battles within psychoanalysis, including those between the Kleinians and the Independents, the English and the French, and the Jewish emigrees versus the Protestants. Khan's life also confronts us with the persistent problem of sexual boundary violations (with a continuous succession of analysands) as well as a childhood context of cultural violence and Islamic religiosity. Then there's Masud Khan himself, a notorious and complex personality—at once grandiose, dramatic, profoundly insightful, and perverse. Taking on the task of his biography, how his personality evolved from within these complex and intersecting contexts, is monumental; we all benefit that Linda Hopkins was up to the task.
There are choices a biographer must make in culling through the vast research surrounding her muse. This task is made more complex still by the fact that Khan was himself prolific. He wrote four books and published over 140 professional papers (most in English, although some are still not translated from French). He also penned his personal/professional diaries—the unpublished 3,045 pages of “Work Books.” Finally, many people are still alive who knew him and who welcomed the opportunity to be interviewed. With such a variety of sources, there are bound to be contradictory stories and many details ancillary to the main narratives. Many biographers see it as their task to find both the full and the ultimate truth, presenting volumes of “facts” supported by endless cross-references and obsessive corroborations. These then strain to coalesce around some consistency while leaving nothing out. Mercifully, Hopkins chose a different path and kept her vast research efforts in the background, weaving a few essential narratives t