You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For many years, Friedrich Nietzsche's reputation was badly tarnished by the false claims of Nazi propagandists that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi.
Walter Kaufmann (1950) deserves major credit for rehabilitating Nietzsche's intellectual reputation. During the last decade of Nietzsche's life, his mental capacities deteriorated steadily, due probably to neurosyphilis. , a major contributor to the psychoanalytic literature, left such a legacy of outrageous behavior that his reputation may never recover. Like Nietzsche, his physical and mental health deteriorated severely in his final years. Many of us concluded that Khan was not worth reading after his final book (Khan 1988) revealed him to be a malignantly narcissistic bigot, and after his former patient, Wynne Godley (2001), opened the floodgates to many further horrifying revelations about Khan's professional and personal impairment.
If future clinicians read Khan, it will be in large measure thanks to Linda Hopkins's extraordinary book. She comes across as being as reliable a narrator as Khan was deceitful; as able to win the trust of the dozens of people she interviewed for this book as Khan was able to antagonize people; as scrupulously ethical as Khan was “psychopathic” (p. 381, quoting A. Green). Hopkins faced some ethical conundrums in deciding how to obtain and use crucial information, including material from several of Khan's former patients. She acknowledges that Glen Gabbard helped her resolve these quandaries (and he deserves to be listed in the index, since he is mentioned four times in the book). Hopkins quotes Khan's one-time friend André Green at the beginning of her book: “No one can deny Masud's talent. But it is also impossible to deny his sickness and his evil nature” (p. xix).
Khan appears to have been unanalyzable. Hopkins faults his three training analysts for their failure to set adequate limits on his egregious behavior. Khan became an analytic candidate in the first place through a misunderstand