False Self

Notorious for his flamboyant personality and, at first, widely acknowledged as a brilliant clinician, M. Masud R. Kahn (1924-1989) exposed through his candor and scandalous behaviour 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, Richard Redgrave, Julie Andrews, Rudolph Nureyev 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.

In telling the story of this provocative man, Linda Hopkins makes use of unprecedented access to Kahn’s peers, relatives and analysands in order to provide an in-depth and balanced account of Masud Kahn as a talented and deeply conflicted man.