Many nurses are genuine presences in the nursing situation. Some have tried to share their experiences; some have not. And, there are those who are not genuine presences in the nursing situation. One wonders if this has influenced the distinctions nurses have made over the years with certainty when considering their nurse contemporaries. Often one hears, "she is a good nurse, a natural." These positive critics are often up against it when asked, "why, how, what?" Descriptive literary conceptualizations of nursing that reflect this quality of nurse-being (presence, intersubjectiveness) call for nurses willing to search out and bring to awareness, the mysteries of their commonplace, their familiar, and to appreciate the unique ideas, values, and meanings fundamental to their practice. Conceptualization of these qualities by practicing nurses is basic and necessary to the development of a science and an actualized profession of nursing.
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.