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.
The title of Linda Hopkins’ biography of Masud Khan is shocking at first. How could the phrase ‘false self’ sum up the personality of a long admired, highly accomplished, even brilliant (a word one uses both in a positive and a negative sense) psychoanalyst? The term is undeniably, unfortunately apt, it turns out, but it does not begin to describe the dangerous complexity of the man.
In this fascinating, extremely well researched, well documented (there are ninety eight pages of endnotes) and exhaustive biography, Hopkins presents us with a man who defies categorization, whose origins are so unconventional as to be unique in someone of our profession and whose make-up was, like his background and culture, nothing if not a study in incompatible qualities. Herself an analyst, the biographer was able to gain unprecedented access both to friends and colleagues of Khan and to his diaries, which had been in the safekeeping of his friend, the late Robert Stoller. Naturally Hopkins’ portrait never wavers towards either a sympathetic or a negatively judgmental tone, as with any biographical study of worth, but this must have been no mean feat.
Khan was an outstandingly intelligent and original thinker in possession of considerable literary talents who made significant and lasting contributions to analytic literature. He seems to have been capable of remarkable, even uncanny, intuition and sensitivity. Accounts by former patients suggest that he nurtured states of idealization, which seem ultimately to have been followed by strong negative feelings, but they had lifelong attachments to him persisted all the same. Hopkins’ interviews of them frequently reveal that they were grateful for, or in awe of, something remarkable he did for them in spite of everything else they may have suffered in his care. According to the psychoanalyst Sadie Gillespie, he was capable of acts of pure kindness (p. 136). He was also snobbish, arrogant and meretricious and probably psychopathic to the co