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The life of Masud Khan, recounted in detail in this clearly written and carefully researched biography by Linda Hopkins, is a painful, tragic, yet fascinating story. Given Khan's great promise, meteoric rise to prominence, and disastrous fall from grace, his story serves psychoanalysts as an object lesson and a cautionary tale. Readers of this biography will be alternately exasperated and moved by Hopkins's account of Khan's struggles with his personal demons —struggles in which he too often failed.
Clinicians will recognize within themselves the temptations and challenges Khan faced in attempting heroic work with deeply disturbed patients. There is much for us to learn from reflecting upon Khan's unique mixture of creativity and madness, of penetrating insight and uncanny intuition matched by damnable faults and excesses, as well as from the responses and failures of those around him in regard to his misbehaviors. As literary critic Alan Tate said of poet Hart Crane, Khan's life story offers us a tale of “incalculable moral value … [that can] reveal our defects in their extremity” (Kirsch 2006, p. 83). And as Hopkins herself writes, “The story of Masud Khan is a story not just of one man, but of an entire community” (p. 33 of the subject book).
Hopkins draws upon extensive primary sources, including Khan's personal correspondence, workbooks, and diaries, as well as interviews with friends, intimates, colleagues, patients, and students, to present a vivid picture of a complex man who was charismatic and brilliant. Khan was also a creative and innovative thinker,