In discussing Margy Sperry's article on fostering cultural understanding in treatments where therapist and patient come from different racial and/or ethnic backgrounds, the author accentuates the therapist's capacity to embrace the limits of his or her knowledge of self and of patient. Agreeing with Sperry that it is more comfortable to emphasize commonalities than to explore differences, the author employs Orange's concept of “intersubjective vulnerability” to suggest a shift in the therapist's posture from being “the one who knows” to accepting both parties' fragile humanity in the face of the alien and the unknown, resulting in an expansion and deepening of the dialogue. A clinical case illustrating this process is described.