The client-counselor match and the corrective emotional experience: Evidence from interpersonal and attachment research.

Models of brief psychodynamic therapy posit the corrective emotional experience as a key factor in therapeutic change. Although widely taught and used, these models do not have strong empirical support. This article proposes the client–counselor match as a facilitating condition for a corrective emotional experience and reviews the relevant evidence from attachment and interpersonal research. Overall, the notion of the corrective emotional experience has received some support from attachment research, which looks at complementarity of styles at the personality level. Interpersonal research, rather, considers complementarity of actual exchanges in therapy and has yielded mixed results. It thus appears that the validity of the corrective experience has yet to be established, notably through the use of a more fine-grained approach. One of the most famous yet controversial claims ever made in the psychotherapy literature is that of Luborsky, Singer, and Luborsky (1975), who suggested that all psychotherapies produce somewhat equivalent outcomes. Empirical re-search has since repeatedly tried to challenge this assertion; a host of studies have searched for in-dividual dispositions of both client and therapist that may have contributed to Luborsky et al.’s null findings. At least 175 categories of client characteristics and 40 therapist traits have been studied as potential predictors of treatment effec-tiveness (Beutler, 1991), and it has been sug-gested that the client–counselor match accounts for a greater portion of the outcome than does any single characteristic of the client or of the coun-selor. The interaction between the two partners’ personal characteristics has thus become a focus in recent counseling literature (Beutler, 1991;