The 'hidden selves' that Masud Khan reveals to us in this third volume of his psychoanalytic writings are to be understood in two ways. Primarily, they are those aspects of the self which are inherent in, but unsuspected by, the individual concerned, and which need to be identified if that individual is to achieve a full and healthy self-awareness. More broadly, they are the ingredients of human nature which may not be evident on the surface but which can be brought out through literature or art, for example, or through the insights gained in psychoanalysis. In analysis, and over a period of...

Perversions and borderline states were, by accident of fate, Masud Khan's chief preoccupation in his clinical work during the last three decades of his life. In an earlier volume, The Privacy of the Self, he presented what he called the natural and private crystallization of his experience with his patients and teachers; notably, in the latter category, Anna Freud, John Rickman and D.W. Winnicott. In this later book he takes his cue from Freud who, as he says, diagnosed the sickness of Western Judaeo-Christian cultures in terms of "the person alienated from himself". Masud Khan's basic...