False Self

The Life of Masud Khan

Linda Hopkins
Karnac Publishing
560 pages
ISBN: 9781913494827
November 2022

Notorious for his flamboyant personality and, at first, widely acknowledged as a brilliant clinician, M. Masud R. Kahn (1924-1989) exposed the bigotry of his proponents-turned-detractors. The son of a wealthy landowner in rural India (now Pakistan), Kahn grew up in a world of privilege radically different from the Western lifestyle he would adopt after moving to London, where we was closely connected to some of the most creative and accomplished people of his time, including Donald Woods Winnicott, Anna Freud, Robert Stoller and many more. Kahn's subsequent downfall reveals not only his psychic fragility but also the world of intrigues and deceptions in the psychoanalytic community of the time.