Patient-therapist match: Revelation or resistance?

Patient-therapist match is a relatively new yet frequently invoked concept within psychoanalysis. Despite Freud's appreciation of the influence of the analyst's past to his or her work within the analytic setting, psychoanaly sts have historically held varied opinions about the degree to which the an alyst's personality and conflicts affect the analytic process. As analysis was reconfigured as a two-person system, attention focused on the fit betwe en patient and analyst. The literature on patient-therapist match is review ed, and the conclusion reached that this intuitively appealing concept suff ers from a lack of rigorous definition and operationalization. Many authors invoke match in ways that imply that it is real, static, external to the d omain of analytic inquiry, and unaffected by analytic process. In its prese nt form, the concept of patient-therapist match obstructs rather than facil itates analytic exploration and obscures rather than clarifies what happens between analyst and analysand in psychoanalysis. By suggesting that match exists as a reality outside the domain of transference and countertransfere nce, analysts may overlook the importance of psychoanalytic technique in cr eating a sense of match. Analysts may attribute stalemated or limited analy ses to a bad match, rather than tenaciously exploring the transference-coun tertransference configurations that remain at the heart of analytic work.