False Self

"Well I think it’s an extraordinary book. It’s essentially a biography of a psychoanalyst who was famous in the 60s and 70s called Masud Khan. Masud was actually a friend of my parents, so I knew him, and he was a very glittering figure. He was incredibly handsome and he was married to a famous prima ballerina of that era and this book was written by a psychoanalyst and it’s an attempt to help you understand the difficulty Masud had in understanding himself and achieving an authentic self, and his failure. And it’s a very disturbing book in that Linda Hopkins had access and she’s interviewed a lot of his patients and she’s interviewed everybody of any significance in relation to him. But at the same time she’s got hold of his diaries and so you have this internal story of what he is trying to achieve in his life emotionally, and the struggle that he has, and the way he rationalises things and the way he perceives things. It’s an extraordinary exploration of a highly intelligent and citable man’s attempt to be honest with himself and others and his failure to do so. I think one of the points that the book makes is that it was the era in which psychoanalysis was developing the technique of regression through the transference which means that you will re-experience your difficulties in early infancy and as a toddler through the relationship with the therapist. Unfortunately, Masud didn’t really achieve this in his own analysis. He was first analysed by Donald Winnicot but apparently his analysis with Winnicot only lasted two and a half years and he had other analyses but none of his other analysts were capable of really getting through all his defences. A very sad story. In many ways one of the purposes of the book is to try and bring his reputation back. He was a very unethical analyst who slept with his patients so it’s an important book – he was editor of the Psychoanalytic Journal – but, perhaps most important of all, he was a key figure in helping Donald Winnicot to achieve what he achieved intellectually and as a therapist. But most of all it tells us all about ourselves. The problems Masud had are found in most people, in all of us, to some degree and it’s an exploration of how the hell you manage to overcome your self-perception and get through to something real, overcome your narcissism and your omnipotence and various defences that we build up to protect ourselves from the truth? On the contrary. She suggests that he might well have been able to had he been able to benefit from the kind of analysis that was only being developed at that stage. A lot has been learnt since then. Nowadays there are analysts who are lot more sophisticated."