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Eleven years ago Howard Bacal presented a paper at the Sixth Annual Conference on the Psychology of the Self that proved to be seminal for self psychology and was entitled “Optimal Responsiveness and the Therapeutic Process” (1985). With this paper, and the introduction of a new concept, optimal responsiveness, as well as a new way of viewing the analyst's participation in the therapeutic process, a conversation was begun among us that is still going on. Charles Spezzano (1993) has written, based upon his own application to psychoanalysis of Richard Rorty's (1989) work, that new psychoanalytic concepts appear when we want to discuss certain clinical problems with each other, but we perceive ourselves to be unable to discuss them adequately in the language and conceptual framework familiar and available to us. This has been