HUMANISTIC NURSING PRACTICE THEORY
Substantively this chapter introduces two aspects of the humanistic nursing practice theory: first, what this theory proposes and, second, how the proposals of the theory evolved.
Concisely, humanistic nursing practice theory proposes that nurses consciously and deliberately approach nursing as an existential experience. Then, they reflect on the experience and phenomenologically describe the calls they receive, their responses, and what they come to know from their presence in the nursing situation. It is believed that compilation and complementary syntheses of these phenomenological descriptions over time will build and make explicit a science of nursing.
HUMANISTIC NURSING: ITS MEANING
Nursing is an experience lived between human beings. Each nursing situation reciprocally evokes and affects the expression and manifestations of these human beings' capacity for and condition of existence. In a nurse this implies a responsibility for the condition of herself or being. The term "humanistic nursing" was selected thoughtfully to designate this theoretical pursuit to reaffirm and floodlight this responsible characteristic as fundamentally inherent to all artful-scientific nursing. Humanistic nursing embraces more than a benevolent technically competent subject-object one-way relationship guided by a nurse in behalf of another. Rather it dictates that nursing is a responsible searching, transactional relationship whose meaningfulness demands conceptualization founded on a nurse's existential awareness of self and of the other. {4}
EXISTENTIAL EXPERIENCE
Uniqueness—Otherness
Existential experience infers human awareness of the self and of otherness. It calls for a recognition of each man as existing singularly in-his-situation and struggling and striving with his fellows for survival and becoming, for confirmation of his existence and understanding of its meaning.
Martin Buber, philosophical anthropologist and rabbi, expressed artfully this uniqueness, struggle, and potential of each man. He said:
"Sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category, [man] surrounded by the air of a chaos which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another."[1]