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A patient comes to the office for a first session, takes a deep breath, and wonders, “How to begin?” There is so much that is relevant, interrelated, and it is difficult to know where to start. Such is the feeling Linda Hopkins must have had when beginning her recently published biography of Masud Khan, False Self: The Life of Masud Khan. There are so many strands to Khan's life, from his childhood and family life in colonial India, his journey to Britain at age 22 to seek a personal analysis, his analysis with Winnicott and his editing of Winnicott's writings, his marriage to a Russian ballerina, and later the mental illness and alcoholism that tarnished his reputation and led to his isolation and death.
Like a good analyst, Hopkins listens well, and provides a wonderful holding environment for this bristling and vibrant life-story. The 400-plus pages are undoubtedly edited down - evidenced in part by nearly 100 additional pages of endnotes - and yet the book is very readable, moves quickly, and is fascinating. Given Khan's emphasis in his own clinical work on the holding environment, it is a tribute to him that Hopkins is able to contain and present Khan's rich, multi-faceted story.
Although there is one other scholarly biography of Masud Khan (Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality, by Roger Willoughby in 2005), Hopkins was the first biographer to be granted access to a complete copy of Khan's unpublished Work Books, which are quoted extensively. Hopkins also conducted interviews with Khan's colleagues, friends, relatives, and analysands. Five chapters of the book detail Khan's clinical work from the late 1940s until 1980, drawing from interviews with analysands and supervisees who recall Khan's clinical work with them. This window into Khan's development as an analyst alone makes the book worthwhile for those interested in the history of British psychoanalysis and the technical implementation of Winnicott's and Khan's formulations of the holding environment and regr