Rejoinder to Lemberger

Lemberger (2012) argues that the author (Hansen, 2012) has no basis for recommending differential weightings or priorities to humanism and science, because those ideologies are only meaningful as they are subjectively interpreted within the counseling encounter. The author responds that their positions are completely compatible, but his focus was on culture and Lemberger's was on individuals. ********** Lemberger (2012) has written the type of article that I had hoped would be submitted to this special issue. It was thoughtful, scholarly, philosophically creative, and provided substantial persuasive challenges to my original positions. Furthermore, his gracious style of responding epitomized civil debate at its best. I strongly agree with many of the conceptual points Lemberger makes. Lemberger (2012), in turn, seems to agree with my overall thesis, as evidenced by statements such as "I believe that Hansen (2010) is correct that the scientific ideology has infested the counseling profession" (p. 166). From our respective conceptual positions, however, Lemberger and I often arrive at very different (and even conflictual) concrete recommendations for professional action. Reading his article, then, left me with an intriguing intellectual puzzle: Why did our general agreement about overarching philosophical assumptions result in significant disagreement about professional recommendations? After considerable reflection, I believe I have solved this puzzle. To understand and appraise my solution, though, our respective positions must be contrasted. CONTRASTING POSITIONS AND THE LEMBERGER CRITIQUE My position (Hansen, 2012) is that the counseling culture has been overtaken by the reductive forces of science, an ideology that is founded on the ideals of singular truth and conceptual parsimony. I saw signs of this ideological takeover in the simple, subject-less image of clients (i.e., as technique-responsive diagnostic entities) that is currently being proffered in counseling culture, and the contemporary emphasis on singular truth in professional counseling, as evidenced by the standardization of treatment protocols, professional identities, and counselor training. I argue that the progressive ideological creep of science is a dangerous trend for a profession whose members make their living by embracing human complexity and multiple meaning systems. To counteract this trend, I suggest that the counseling profession should purposefully identify with the humanities, which, in contrast to science, celebrates human complexity and multiple meaning systems. I offer specific recommendations for shifting counseling culture to a humanities foundation, such as prioritizing professional debate over ideological unity. Lemberger (2012), on the other hand, argues that my recommendations are too fixed and wide ranging. Although he agrees that counseling culture has become infested by scientific ideology, Lemberger does not agree that this situation should result in a recommendation to lessen scientific influences in professional counseling. In short, we agree on the diagnosis, but disagree about the treatment plan. Lemberger's (2012) disagreement with my recommendations emanate from a phenomenological perspective. According to Lemberger, I have assigned fixed meanings to terms such as science. In the true spirit of humanism, though, I have no basis for assigning fixed meanings. Indeed, terms have different shades of meaning to everyone who encounters them. With this creative phenomenological reasoning as his foundation, Lemberger (2012) offers two persuasive arguments about science. First, because each client has a unique way of perceiving science (and everything else), some clients might gain tremendous benefit from a scientific perspective. Therefore, according to Lemberger, I am not justified in assigning different professional roles or values to science and humanism because the "value of each [i. …