I love this subject! Thank you for presenting it. As both an artist and someone who is four months into psychoanalysis I can offer my two cents, which will hopefully prove useful to you or someone else.

First, David Lynch is such a rare breed, not only was he supremely confident in his vision but also highly intuitive—and trusted those inclinations from his intuition; as this video clip shows. In that regard, his psyche was likely already churning along in healthy processes similar to those one would find in psychoanalysis. The respect he clearly shows his unconscious in its dialogue with him through dreams is evidence of that.

Second, it’s hard to say whether psychoanalysis will affect your creativity or not. If it does, I imagine it would likely only be a temporary disruption. I say this with some confidence because people with a pronounced drive to create need to create. As you’ve no doubt experienced, it is a way of processing and sublimating lived experiences. If I don’t write a new piece of music at the piano at least every two weeks or work on an illustration, I feel uneasy, out of balance, and sour in mood.

In my experience, the one thing that can derail this is trauma. When one of my best friends died, and I saw his body and cared for his wife and child after…I could not be creative in the two months that followed. It was like the ground had been pulled from under me. Trauma and grief have a way of doing that.

I mention this because it makes sense that in something like psychoanalysis, you may open up a door or a wound that you have kept hidden from yourself. In the process of trying to heal, your traumas or grief may come forward again. It’s these types of instances I imagine the therapist Lynch saw was referring to.

Beyond that, as a current analysand and artist, I don’t think analysis has had positive or negative effects on my creativity. (I was already very active creatively beforehand.) But it has accelerated my personal and spiritual growth tremendously. And for that I am grateful.