Using detailed clinical vignettes, the author illustrates how the analyst's fantasy of the ideal patient can be used to advance an analysis at the same time as it fuels mutual resistances. The author suggests that all analysts carry with them a fantasy of the ideal patient that varies from analyst to analyst and from school to school. Such fantasies are often related to images of an ideal free-associative process. They are for the most part descriptively unconscious, becoming conscious only when prompted by the clinical moment. As such, they are part of a countertransference, broadly defined, that is responsive to both the analyst's and the patient's conflictual life.