Introduction

Psychoanalysts trained in the classical tradition in North America were taught that they could, and should, serve as “blank screens” onto which patients projected their difficulties. The expectation was that analysts’ conflicts were to have been resolved in their own analyses. In the context of a belief that only the qualities of the patient determined the outcome of psychoanalysis, it was also assumed that analysts could predict in advance which patients could and could not be successfully analyzed. Given adequate reality testing, affect availability and tolerance, and level of object relationships, if the person was motivated, it was assumed that any analyst of sufficient experience should be able to analyze such a patient. The definition of all these terms remained abstract. The concept of match that my study was designed to explore refers to observable styles, attitudes, and personal characteristics that may be rooted in residual and unanalyzed conflicts triggered in any patient-analyst pair.