I outline how I read the story that Lucyann Carlton tells about the sixth year of treatment with Renee. I hope that the reader will gradually infer where I am standing as I renarrate the treatment—that the reader will begin to hear what shapes my reading of the case and its implications. Briefly, at the end of my discussion, I make more explicit some of what I am calling the evolutionary-existential sensibility that influences and guides my use of both self psychology and contemporary relational theory in my approach to analytic work.