False Self (Paperback)

From the Publisher: Winner of a 2007 Gradiva Award and the 2006 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship The definitive biography of one of the most engaging figures of British psychoanalysis. Notorious for his flamboyant personality and, at first, widely acknowledged as a brilliant clinician, M. Masud R. Khan (1924—1989) exposed through his candor and scandalous behavior the bigotry of his proponents-turned-detractors. The son of a wealthy landowner in rural India (now Pakistan), Khan grew up in a world of privilege radically different from the Western lifestyle he would adopt after moving to London, where he was closely connected to some of the most creative and accomplished people of his time, including Donald Woods Winnicott, Anna Freud, Robert Stoller, Michael Redgrave, Julie Andrews, Rudolph Nureyev, and many more. Khan’s subsequent downfall reveals not only his psychic fragility but the world of intrigues and deceptions in the psychoanalytic community of the time. In telling the story of this provocative man, Linda Hopkins makes use of unprecedented access to Khan’s complete unpublished Work Books, which are quoted extensively. Additionally, she conducted innumerable interviews with Khan’s peers, relatives, and analysands in order to provide an in-depth and balanced account of Masud Khan as a talented and deeply conflicted man.