Neuroscience‐informed counselors suggest that understanding the brain can transform the field of counseling. This article addresses flaws in such arguments. Distinctions are drawn between supportive and informative empirical findings, explanatory and descriptive viewpoints, and the easy and hard problems of consciousness. The author proposes a new theoretical model to ensure working dialogues between humanists and neurocounselors.

This article presents an in‐depth exploration of cognitive complexity. The authors propose that the domains of differentiation and integration signify unique cognitive processes that develop along distinct trajectories. Although differentiated complexity arises from clinical experience and certain training methods, the development of integrative complexity requires enhanced abductive reasoning skills and the use of phenomenological methods. Implications for growing integrative complexity through training, supervision, and clinical practice are provided.

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This article explores how distinct epistemological assumptions in constructivism and phenomenology influence pedagogical approaches in counselor education. Ideological parallels akin to the humanist tradition are drawn, as are irreconcilable distinctions. Practical implications of each are discussed in relation to 3 important counselor training areas: theoretical orientation, psychological concepts, and self‐awareness.

While scholarly references to "holism" are abundant in the literature, the term is often applied as a synonym for multidimensionality. Humanistic counseling is committed to genuinely holistic practices guided by the principle of irreducibility. From a phenomenological stance, what makes humanistic counseling unique is the guiding assumption that pre-reflective subjectivity is not only real rather than epiphenomenal, but the basic source of therapeutic change. By examining philosophical distinctions between psychological mind and phenomenal mind, it becomes clear that humanistic therapies facilitate intrapsychic contact with pre-reflective experience under the presumption that such experiential self-contact is a precondition for post hoc psychological interpretations of experience. Although humanistic strategies can be applied in non-humanistic practice, its guiding philosophical position and purposefulness in practice makes it otherwise ungeneralizable. The concept of holistic irreducibility is defined at two conceptual levels and differences between psychological and phenomenal mind are explored through person-centered and existential therapies. K E Y W O R D S change, holism, humanism, phenomenology, subjectivityThe study of the whole person in humanistic counseling is often discussed with reference to the concepts of holism and irreducibility (Hansen et al., 2014;Schneider et al., 2014). These terms are closely related as both suggest essential features of the human experience are lost when complex systems are examined only in terms of constituent parts or processes rather than in totality. In this respect, holism and irreducibility are virtually synonymous in therapy-related discourse. Subtler philosophical distinctions between these terms will be eschewed herein, with the phrase holistic irreducibility used to signify their commonality.The premise of this article is that holistic irreducibility is a distinctly humanistic concept that cannot be appreciated in isolation from phenomenological presuppositions. Framed accordingly, both holism and irreducibility point to personhood as a lived subjective experience that includes both pre-reflective and reflective states. Yet this particular notion of holistic irreducibility is not shared when