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Linda Hopkins, the author of this fascinating and troubling biography, trained as an analyst at the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis, a modern Freudian institute devoted to the work of Hyman Spotnitz where she is now a training analyst and supervisor. She explains her interest in Masud Khan as developing partly out of her undergraduate studies in Arabic and Islam, but mainly from her later studies at the Washington School of Psychoanalysis (now the International Psychotherapy Institute in Bethesda, Maryland), an institute oriented toward British psychoanalysis.
was a tremendously influential psychoanalytic thinker and charismatic figure who had a huge impact on the development of British psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis in general, after World War II. His first three books [The Privacy of the Self: Papers on Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique , Alienation in Perversions , and Hidden Selves: Between Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis ] are considered major contributions to psychoanalysis though his work as Winnicott's editor—which probably included much of the actual writing of works like Through Pœdiatrics to Psycho-Analysis—makes him a central figure in the development of psychoanalytic thought in the 1950s and ‘60s. He was also widely considered to be a brilliant, if eccentric, clinician.
Hopkins opens her book with a quote from Khan's one-time friend André Green: “No one can deny Masud's talent. But it is also impossible to deny his sickness and his evil nature. When you have met someone like him, you know that the mind is not simple” (p. xix). How a brilliant and hugely influential psychoanalyst came to a remarkably destructive and ugly end is the underlying question that Hopkins tackles