I thought maybe I should just ask my patient if she would like to meet my friend. That would involve crossing useful boundaries. And would bring my personal life in conflict with my job as therapist, which, among other things, is to help patients understand themselves and discover how to make their own lives as full and rich as possible. I shouldn’t find partners for my patient any more than I should cook her dinner: both are skills she has to develop for herself.

Additionally (and why was I thinking this through so fully?) she might feel coerced into something she really didn’t want to do. A therapeutic relationship is by definition unequal; therapists have considerable power, and patients want to please their therapists. My patient might be reluctant to decline.

Worse yet, what if the date went badly? My patient might wonder whether I really understood her at all or whether I was setting her up as a kind of test.

A colleague told me that when she was in training, her boss, a senior psychiatrist, suggested that she go on a date with one of his patients. She thought it odd, but being curious and open-minded, she agreed.

They went out for drinks, she said, and her date spent the evening pumping her for information about her boss. My colleague’s date seemed less interested in her than in learning more about his therapist.

My colleague later realized that her boss, who was married, had a crush on her. She thinks he set up the match so that he might vicariously enjoy the experience of dating her. True or not, it seems the therapist may not have been acting in his patient’s best interest.

Freud himself dabbled in therapeutic matchmaking and in fact went so far as to encourage one of his patients to leave his wife and pursue another woman. At Freud’s urging, Horace Frink, a psychiatrist Freud analyzed and later nominated to head the New York Psychoanalytic Society, divorced his wife and married Angelika Bijur, one of Dr. Frink’s own patients.