I think the purpose and style of the therapy will be all important.
I cant see anyone who believes that others are going to bleed them dry being able to muster the empathy and master the active listening skills involved in therapeutic relationships, even in brief therapy and solutions focused brief therapy that's pretty much requisite, requisite to forming any kind of therapeutic alliance or the kind of attachment necessary even an initial assessment.
At the initial assessment stage there needs to be opportunities for the sort of openness and honesty which will determine what sort of therapeutic intervention or style is to be employed, or determine if the therapist even uses that style or form of intervention, if you take the example of the Sopranos, which was mentioned already, the therapist in that is advised by another therapist to stop seeing Tony Soprano, she's either a depth psychologist or person centred therapist from what I've seen of the show up to that point and the therapist advising her rightly points out that Tony isnt lacking insight, which is what both of those approachs are about, and therefore should be referred to a cognitive behavioural therapist.
CBT therapists are more about motivation and targetting clearly defined patterns of thinking, or more likely acting, habits, and the therapeutic alliance is more precisely about tracking together progress, set-backs, relapse cycles and the like. I am not convinced that being a domineering or directive personality is necessarily going to work.
Whatever the approach, from the brief therapy/solutions focused brief therapy, which is the most short term in theory, to depth psychology practitioners, which is much more long term, there's going to be terminable and interminable cases, from the days of Freud therapists have speculated as to what causes that or why it is, there's no hard and fast answer even yet but the findings from neuro-psychology about attachment being patterned on the brain I find pretty persuasive.
Attachment style dictates a lot and will influence what Freud first describes as "transference", which can be a good or a bad thing, its most simply the application to every relationship the affects and emotions associated with the first attachment relationship. It could well determine whether any therapeutic alliance is possible from the outset, whether the therapy is going to be terminal or interminal etc. etc.
Sometimes the people who seek therapy to change a specific problematic behaviour, like alcoholism or paranoia, will go into what's called spontaneous remission or appear to recover rapidly because they the therapeutic alliance itself has permitted the satisfaction of a developmental need which has remained unsatisfied, or more likely it compensates for a developmental deficit while it lasts. At least that's one of the conclusions reached from the "good marriage" or "good friends" explanation of why so many people who could have disordered, deficient or improvable attachment styles manage to cope or function without ever having a breakdown, ever requiring a break through or ever coming to the attention of a therapist.