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Luis Kancyper is a training psychoanalyst at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association and a prolific author. He has worked for many years on subjects related to theories of narcissism and the death instinct. His work not only manifests a thorough and profound understanding of Freud, but makes original contributions of its own.
His recent book, Resentimiento terminable e interminable: Psicoanálisis y literatura, was published in 2010. Though rooted primarily in Freud, Kancyper integrates this thinking with concepts from Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, André Green, D. W. Winnicott, Willie Baranger, and Hanna Arendt, as well as with his own ideas. What emerges is a highly original book loaded with enlightening theoretical concepts.
Kancyper believes that literature's profound descriptions of the torments and conflicts afflicting the human soul contribute significantly to psychoanalytic understanding. Here he seeks to wrest theoretical understanding from literature by combining psychoanalytic theory and clinical material with the works of Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Sándor Márai. This makes for reading that it is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally enjoyable.
His focus is on the affect of rancor. He writes about the power of resentment and remorse from both a theoretical and a clinical perspective. Kancyper explains that people have different ways of dealing with frustrations, leading them to be “inhabited” by various types of memories. In addition to rancor, he writes about memories of terror and of pain.
When people are inhabited by the memory of rancor, they feel resentment and a sense of having been victims of unfairness. Such people feel special and privileged in their victimhood. They are arrogant and want revenge. They feel compelled to settle the score for a past they cannot forget. Incapable of mourning, they live the present in terms of an unsettled past.