PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION
Phenomenology directs us to the study of the "thing itself." The existential literature, descriptions of what man has come to know and understand in his experience, has evolved from the use of the phenomenological approach. In the humanistic nursing practice theory the "thing itself" is the existentially experienced nursing situation. Both phenomenology and existentialism value experience, man's capacities for surprise and knowing, and honor the evolving of the "new."
What Does Humanistic Nursing Practice Theory Ask the Nurse to Describe?
Nurses experience with other human beings peak life events: creation, birth, winning, nothingness, losing, separation, death. Their "I-Thou" empathetic {7} relations with persons during these actual lived experiences and their own experiential-educational histories make "the between" of the nursing situation unique. Through in-touchness with self, authentic awareness and reflection on such experiences the human nurse comes to know. Humanistic nursing practice theory asks that the nurse describe what she comes to know: (1) the nurse's unique perspective and responses, (2) the other's knowable responses, and (3) the reciprocal call and response, the between, as they occur in the nursing situation.
Why Does Humanistic Nursing Practice Theory Ask That Existential Nursing
Experience Be Described Phenomenologically?
There are many reasons. Philosophically and fundamentally the reason relates to how humanistic nursing perceives the purpose and aim of nursing. It views nursing as the ability to struggle with other man through peak experiences related to health and suffering in which the participants in the nursing situation are and become in accordance with their human potential. So, like Elie Wiesel, the novelist, who states in One Generation After that he writes to attest to events of human existence and to come to understand, humanistic nursing proposes that human forms of existence in nursing situations need attestation and that through describing, nurses will understand better and relate to man as man is. Thus the profession of nursing's service contribution to the community of man will ever become more.
The reasons for phenomenologically describing nursing are complex, interinfluential, and their ramifications are far reaching. Sequentially, the study and description of human phenomena presented in nursing situations will affect (1) the quality of the nursing situation, (2) man's general knowledge of the variation in human capacity for beingness, and (3) the development and form of the evolvement of nursing theory and science.
How Can Nurses Begin to Describe Humanistic Nursing Phenomenologically?
The process of how to describe nursing events entails deliberate responsible, conscious, aware, nonjudgmental existence of the nurse in the nursing situation followed by disciplined authentic reflection and description.
There are obvious common lived human experiences which if considered and wondered about, can advance a nurse's ability for phenomenological description. These experiences are easily cited, yet not easily plumbed. Often experiences such as anger, frustration, waiting, apathy, confusion, perplexity, questioning, surprise, conflict, headache, crying, laughing, joy are quickly theoretically and analytically interpreted, labeled, and dismissed. Examining, reexamining, mulling over, brooding on, and fussing with the situational context of these experiences as nonlabeled, raw human lived data can yield {8} knowledge. Knowledge of the nurse's and her other's unique human existence in their on-going struggle becomes explicit. Superficial treatment of such human clues results in nonfulfillment of the realistic human possibilities of artful-scientific professional knowing and nursing.
Words are the major tools of phenomenological description. They are limited by our human ability to express, and yet they are the best tools we have for expressing the human condition. The novelist James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, says that though man or human relatedness never could be described perfectly it would be the greater crime not to try. This, too, is a basic premise of the humanistic nursing practice theory.
The words we use to describe and discuss this theory are easy words, everyday English words. We all know them. We, at times, narrow a word's meaning or make it more specific. Some problem is presented by words we are accustomed to using and hearing. Habit and our human fallibility can promote only superficial comprehension. Thoughtful awareness of the meaning of these same sequentially expressed words can convey the complexity of the never completely fathomable "all-at-onceness" of lived existence. This theory is expressed in terms like "existence confirming," "striving," "becoming," "relation," and "reflection." We intend such words to express the grasp with acceptance and recognition of human limitations while awesomely pondering the open-ended scope of each man's potential.
In time, with disciplined authentic reflective description, themes common and significant to nursing situations become apparent. They are then available for compilation, complementary synthesis, and on-going refinement. A nursing resource bank accrues: Not a bank that offers a map of how and what to do but rather one that further stimulates nurses' exploration and understanding.