Humanistic Nursing, page 59 by Josephine Paterson
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ut man, family, and community precisely for presentation. Approaching the data sociopsychologically I framed it in the public health model of promotion of health, prevention of illness, treatment, rehabilitation, and maintenance. I thought of family sociologically as nuclear, procreative, and extended. In accordance with the psychoanalytic model, family members were oral, anal, oedipal, latent, homosexual, adolescent, heterosexual, and/or mature. Community, like person and family, was considered according to a {39} closed paradigm, ranging from ideal to abysmal, from the smallest to the largest unit in which persons congregated for common purposes. I selected from experience nursing examples to make these sociopsychological public health constructs meaningful. I did not start from nursing experiences to come up with nursing concepts of man, family, and community. I denied my particular self as a source of knowledge of these areas. Had education programmed me to value only others' ideas gleaned in the classroom or from books? I projected this devaluation of my own ideas onto my colleagues and until I really knew them gave them what I thought they wanted, others' ideas. Presently I prize my uncertainty about the nature of man in family and community and my striving toward an ever explorative process of being and becoming, available for surprise. Paradoxically, I believe it was these very same capacities, uncertainty and striving, that compelled my superimposing on my colleagues with certainty other persons' and other professions' views. Actually, my certainty about the conundrums: man, family, community come only in particulars and only in fits and starts, and my certainty is at once a truth and a nontruth. I see my aim as ever striving toward certainty while constantly wrestling with the discomfort of uncertainty.
EACH NURSE: A NOETIC LOCUS[2]
Each nurse is a "knowing place." It feels as if my greatest talents, as a human nurse person, awaited my acceptance that came through as I related t