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False Self: The Life of Masud Khan by Linda Hopkins London: Karnac Books, 2008, 525 pp.
This work of biography - miraculous in its way, and very much more than a biography- should be obligatory reading for every psychiatrist under 50 years of age, and for every psychoanalyst of any age.
On a recent visit I paid to the Quirinale, Italy's presidential palace in Rome, this book on Masud Khan came to mind for me, because of the impact of the images - revolutionary, bewildering, inventive, subversive all characteristic of the art of the new century and its intellectual upheaval following Freud. The very same adjectives, admixed with their less attractive meanings, come to mind when one thinks of Masud Khan and his luxuriant engagement with psychoanalysis, central to this book. This biography is not just the story of one man, but a work of scholarship and voluminous research concerning the psychoanalytic community in post-1945 Britain and France, that dominated psychiatry in North America until the century ended.
Linda Hopkins, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, has- perhaps unintentionally- also given psychiatry the best, if not the only, fully detailed clinical study from cradle to grave at age 65 of a case of borderline personality disorder (dsm iv 301.83), still often called psychopathic personality, according to this reviewer. Her book tells the story of this man's unfortunate parenting, mutism in childhood, adolescent bereavement with depressive recurrences ever after, an adult lifestyle of self- aggrandising postures, delinquent mendacity, near misses of prison in London and Geneva for violence and theft, grossly disordered sexuality, and destructiveness and self-destructiveness - ending finally with paranoia and suicidal alcoholism.
Masud Khan is resurrected by Hopkins at a time when the powers in Western psychiatry and psychoanalysis that once lionized him would sooner he were forgotten, neglecting any serious examination of the many lessons his case supplies- not only for the British Psychoanalytical Society (bpas) but for other professions as well. Khan's case was indeed scandalous, but the author's purpose is exploratory and remote from scandal-mongering. Khan emerges here as prodigiously gifted - in intellectual productivity, in scaling the heights of the artistic and social worlds of the West, in attaining clinical summits and professional recognition internationally, as well as being...