In his response to Donna M. Orange and Shlomit Haber-Mosheiov, the author sets out to clarify his position on what constitutes idealism in Kohut's thinking. While noting the academic correctness of the distinction Orange makes between idealism and axiology, he also observes a difference between the emergence of self psychology from its pragmatic roots in North America and a complementary trajectory based in European philosophy. He shows how Kohut's location of ideals and selfobject relationality at the core of the self leads to a metaphysical idealism, as well as to a phenomenology of experience. These views are complementary, and both are grounded in ethics. In Kohut's developed self-psychological ontology, the interactive relationship between analyst and patient transcends personal and pragmatic orientations to establish itself in a wider set of meanings leading to a sense of what Haber-Mosheiov, referencing Levinas, calls infinite or ethical openness or, in her own words, “to be each and every one of our patients” without appropriation of the other.