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.
THE EVOLVEMENT OF HUMANISTIC NURSING PRACTICE THEORY
Since 1960 Loretta T. Zderad and myself in dialogue, together, and with groups of nurses in graduate schools and in nursing service situations have reflected on, explored, and questioned our own and others' nursing situational experiences. Over this period we have come to value and appreciate the meaningfulness of these situations to man's existence. This constantly augmented our feelings of responsibility for contributing to these situations beneficially. Therefore, we looked at them for their tractability to research methodology. Their loadedness with variations, changes, uncontrollables, and our negative feelings about the implications of viewing human beings as predictable left the strict scientism of positivistic method wanting at this stage of man's knowing. We saw objectivity in nursing situations or our questions, nursing questions, in the realm of needing to now how man experienced his existence. This objectivity, or man's real lived reality paradoxically is subjectively ridden, man-world.
The existential literature dealt with substantive themes encountered in nursing experiences. As I previously stated this literature evolves from a phenomenological {9} approach to studying being and existence. This approach to studying, describing, and developing an artistic science of nursing became Dr. Zderad's and my long-sought haven. All along existentialism and phenomenology had been ours 'and many nurses' "what" and "how." Now we had labels that were acceptable and reputable to many—most of all to ourselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Martin Buber, "Distance and Relation," trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, in The Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965), p. 71.
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