Part 14 (2/2)

_Humanities and the Arts_, p. 95.

[8] Garner, p. 40.

[9] Pica.s.so as quoted in _My Name Is Asher Lev_.

[10] John Hersey, _The Conspiracy_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p.

82.

[11] Faye G. Abdellah, ”The Nature of Nursing Science,” _Nursing Research_, Vol. XVIII (September-October, 1969), p. 393.

[12] ”Art,” _The Great Ideas_: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World I, Vol. 2, 1952, pp. 64-65.

[13] Ellen T. Fahy, ”Nursing Process as a Performing Art,” _Humanities and the Arts_, p. 124.

[14] Martin Buber, _I and Thou_, 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 9.

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9

A HEURISTIC CULMINATION

This chapter presents an application of the humanistic nursing practice theory over time and an outcome. The outcome represents my present conscious conceptualization of my personal theory of nursing. It has grown out of my nursing practice experience, my reflecting, relating, describing, and synthesizing. This is heuristic culmination of much mulling over my lived world of nursing.

ANGULAR VIEW: PRESENT PERSPECTIVE

In 1971 after a presentation on concept development I heard myself in a chatty response to the audience declare my unique theory of nursing. It was based in constructs that I had developed and conceptualized.

Previously I had viewed these constructs only as distinct ent.i.ties. My synthesis of them surprised me. This was the first time I conveyed them as my why, how, and what of nursing. This synthesis may have emerged as a sequence to my reexamination and reflection on each of these constructs in preparation for this 1971 presentation.[1] Now it became evident that their sequential evolvement had a logic that had come from my being without my awareness.

Since 1971 I have planned to reflect on these synthetic constructs to better understand how they relate to one another complementarily. Why?

To further the development of these constructs and to state them as propositions. Statements of propositions are movement toward nursing theory. Theory is considered here as a conceptualized vision teased out of my knowing from my nursing experience.

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Like Elie Wiesel, the novelist and literary artist, I write to better understand and to attest to happenings. This chapter is the fruit of this endeavor.

The first term, ”comfort,” was developed as a construct in 1967. After recording and exploring my clinical experiential data, a conceptualized response emerged to my question: ”Why, as a nurse, am I in the clinical health-nursing situation?” The second term, ”clinical,” was developed as a construct in 1968. It was a conceptualized response to a dialectical process within myself. I asked, ”What is clinical?” I answered, ”I am a clinician.” I asked, ”As a nurse clinician what do I do; what is the condition of my being in the nursing situation?” I answered, ”This described would equate to clinical.” Consequently I compared and contrasted two nursing experiences similarly labeled to properly grasp the principle of ”clinical” for conceptualization. The third term or phrase, ”all-at-once,” arose intuitively within me as a construct in 1969 and was partially conceptualized. It arose after mulling over other nurses' published clinical data and asking, ”What can you tell me of the clinical nursing situation?” ”What do you perceive as the nature of nursing?” Therese G. Muller's, Ruth Gilbert's and my thought on the nursing situation merged into a view of these as multifariously loaded with all levels of incomparable data, the ”all-at-once.”

Incommensurables relate to the nature of nursing and its concerns. How can one study unrelated appearances? Muller often used an historical approach while Gilbert emphasized individualization. In humanistic nursing practice theory a descriptive, intersubjective, phenomenological approach is proposed for greater understanding and attestation of the events and process of the nursing situation. The construction of ”comfort, clinical, and all-at-once” I would now label as conceptualized phenomenologically. I view them as relevant phenomena to any nurse and this nurse-in-her-nursing-world.

Theory: Unrest, Beginning Involvement

This desire to develop nursing theory goes back to my years (1959-64) as a faculty member in a graduate nursing program. I fussed with the idea, did not know exactly what I was fussing about, and expressed my desire, interest, and concern poorly. Much, I am sure now, to others' dismay.

Teaching in nursing was an offering of mult.i.tudinous theories developed in and for other disciplines using nursing examples. There were both similarities and differences in the many nursing examples in which attempts were made to describe the qualities of the partic.i.p.ants'

beings. Emphasis was placed on the observations by the nurse of the others' responses in the nursing situation. Nursing education was rife with lengthy repet.i.tive examples utilized to focus on particular variations. I desired a unifying base applicable to all nursing situations. This was not a seeking for conformity nor an attempt to negate individuality. Certainly I did not want such a base to exclude individual nurses' talents. Rather this base, foundation of nursing indicative of the nature of nursing, would heuristically promote endless variations to flow, blossom, cross-pollinate, and evolve. {97}

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