Different architectures of creativity: Louis and Nathaniel Kahn

The author analyzes Nathaniel Kahn's documentary film My Architect: A Son's Journey, a tribute to the writer-director's father Louis, the famous architect, who died suddenly when Nathaniel was eleven years old. The film's poetic, evocative images form a testimony to the silent working through that Nathaniel did in searching for his lost father and to the complex intertwining of mourning and creativity. Creativity is seen as both the cause and the effect of working through, as it gives life to a new meaning and allows replacement of the lost object by an object found again. Bereavement, symbolization, and the birth of representation appear to be connected with one another, both when the most elementary representations are involved and when the more complex and artistic ones are. Where and when it is possible to recover a representation that can survive the absence of the lost object, there is a potentially creative psychic space that can be made fertile again.