Before knowing how to approach the rewriting of my clinical paper as a partial requirement for receiving my doctoral degree I experienced a depression. I felt frightened, angry, and inadequate. The original clinical paper had been judged as more intellectual and scholarly than clinical. I could conceive of only two alternatives. Both seemed self-defeating. One, I could revise my former clinical paper into a more intellectual and scholarly paper that still {104} would not be clinical and would still leave my "I" out. Or, two, I could revise my former clinical paper, dump all my feelings in the situational experience, blame everyone else for these feelings, and culminate at least with my clinical passions visible. Conflict resulted from my considering pursuing either of these routes. I was immobilized for a time. A time limitation and time passing pushed me to begin somewhere. I began. Choosing the second alternative in the belief that at least through writing I would better understand what I had lived in the experience.

I could support the value of dredging up these old feelings and looking at them. Authentically letting myself be aware of what I had experienced, not necessarily communicating this or acting out in accordance with these redredged feelings; just really looking at them might allow me choice in how I wanted to live with them. One support for the value of looking at these old feelings was my own past three and one-half years in psychoanalysis in which I profited through such a process. The other support was my readings of the past two years. These included works of Russell,[6] Nietzsche,[7] Plato,[8] Popper,[9] Dewey,[10] Buber,[11] Bergson,[12] Cousins,[13] and de Chardin.[14]

As this experience became in shape and meaning through my writing, I began to view this product as like an existential play filled with blatant atrocities and absurdities that had to be nonrealities. This production, also, made visible beautiful raw data. As meaning in this clinical nursing consultation experience as a graduate student became evident, comparison of it with the meaning of clinical work experiences in nursing consultation situations flowed naturally. Then joy, it was like sunshine burst forth and warmed my spirit.

Before entering school, I was, for two years, a mental health psychiatric clinical nurse consultant to a staff of forty-five visiting nurses. I had become intrigued {105} with what I had come to understand about consultation related to clinical situations. I wrote a paper for publication on the subject. Busy in the process of returning to school, and awaiting the publication of two other papers—both of these proceedings feeling unreal and out of my control, not to mention self-exposing—I merely filed in my desk the typed submittable rendition of this consultation paper. Now, I dug it out. This meant that I had two conceptualized presentations of similar type personal experiences in nursing consultation to compare and contrast. From these, my conceptualization of clinical, and the values on which my clinical practice rests, could be extrapolated.

A Student Consultation Experience Becomes Clinical

In the graduate student nurse consultation experience I felt helpless, confused, unwanted, guilty, anxious, and unimportant. It was a passion-filled experience for me. As a nurse-student consultant among interdisciplinary nonstudent-consultants I experienced dependency for my being and doing on persons I viewed as anxious, critical, nonempathetic, and inadequate. We were attempting to offer consultation to a professional group of nonpsychiatric mental health oriented consultees who were anxious and felt inadequate in this area. I felt forced into an observer rather than participant mode of being, and my recorded data support this. Impotency comes to mind when I recall this experience, as well as a racking rage and suffering that obliterates feelings of love, good-will, tenderness, or hope. About that time I was reading Nietzsche's eternal recurrence phenomenon[15] and viewed it most pessimistically—all was awful, it would continue to be awful, life was just a vicious cycle of awfulness.

Defense or health, it is questionable. Suddenly, perhaps it was having hit feelings of rock bottom, I began to view Nietzsche's eternal recurrence phenomenon optimistically. Did the polarization of my negative feelings magnetically call forth my opposite feelings? All, now, contained the new, it would continue to contain the new, life was a series of similar and yet different cycles that always contained the new.

Now my reflections let in hope, positiveness, comradeship, good feelings, and progress made by myself and others in our year and a half together as consultants. During this period we met with the consultees for an hour once or twice a week. The group had continued over this period despite its components of psychiatric mental health professionals and nonpsychiatric mental health profession culturally, professionally, and historically having been quite alienated from one another. Attendance had improved some over time. Toward the end of the year and a half, during the last three months, the focus of discussion was on patients and their worlds for longer periods of time. There was less defensive acting out in which things, fees, time, and mechanics consumed the hour.

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Toward the end of these sessions the consultant chief found more acceptable space in which to meet for the consultation. Eating lunch became part of the session. Food can be looked at in many ways. In this case it seemed to be a cohesive force, rather than a distracting, socializing force. Was this because of the underlying meanings food had for these people? Or was the meaning of food in this situation concrete? Now the consultees could have their lunch served to them while receiving consultation. This latter saved their time and meant money to them. This was a giving gesture on the part of the consultants even though the lunch monies did come out of the project funding source. The meaning of food was never discussed in the group. I wonder if this feeding was done with deliberate awareness or was just serendipitous.