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This is the third biography of Khan to have been written over the last 20 years. The first was written by one of his ex-patients, Judy Cooper, Speak of Me As I Am: The Life and Work of Masud Khan . There followed Masud Khan: The Myth and The Reality by R. Willoughby (Free Association Books, ). Linda Hopkins's decision to write this biography grew out of her respect for his early analytic writing. She was training to become an analyst in Philadelphia and was puzzled as to why he was not widely read or studied in the USA. This biography might be said to be an exploration of this question, for he is acknowledged to have had literary gifts and to have contributed several original ideas in his first three books, The Privacy of the Self , Alienation in the Perversions and Hidden Selves , yet his writing is seldom referred to in trainings in the UK and the USA. One answer to that question might be found in his last book, When Spring Comes . His description of boundary violations and his extravagant anti-Semitism in the chapter ‘A Dismaying Homosexual’ finally brought him into public disgrace and expulsion from the BPAS though, as Hopkins shows, some believed this expulsion was long overdue.
Hopkins's biography of Masud Khan took 13 years to write which is not surprising for it is an extensive work with detailed references and notes as well as interviews with many of his colleagues and ex-patients. She charts his slow descent into megalomaniac madness in a way that is reminiscent of the tragedies of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Shakespeare's King Lear, but Khan's self-destructive life does not have the redemptive quality of melody or poetry that leaves the heart uplifted. Instead one is left with the feeling that ‘he had too much rage and not enough courage’ (p. 234), as his friend Robert Stoller wrote after Khan's death.