Humanistic Nursing, page 99 by Josephine Paterson
<< Return to Title Details & Download
Purchase this title in paperback at Amazon.com
100
ch correlates well with the struggle experienced by me in clarifying my approach to patients in public health, medical-surgical, and psychiatric mental health situations. In these situations, one truly has to struggle with democratically keeping one's windows open to the world. And this is a continual process. Having experienced this struggle in clinical nursing made this approach to research valid and meaningful to me.
Preparing the mind for knowing in clinical or research endeavors may be accomplished by several means. One means is by immersing one's self in dramatic and literary works and contemplating, reflecting on, and discussing them as they relate to the knower's already known, in this case, nursing practice. In clinical or research nursing the selection of literary works to stimulate the opening of one's human view is based on their presentation, depictions, and descriptions of man's nature. In literature authors share their thoughts as men and present possible ways men may view and relate to their worlds.
Phase II: Nurse Knowing of the Other Intuitively
Bergson conceives of man knowing through a dilatation of his imagination getting inside of, into le durée, into the rhythm and mobility of the other. Living the rhythm of the other he believes results in an absolute, intuitive, inexpressible, unique knowledge of the other. He says:
"... an absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to go with analysis."
"... from intuition one can pass on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition."
"... fixed concepts can be extracted by our thought from the mobile reality; but there is not means whatever of reconstituting with the fixity of concepts the mobility of the real."[14]
The known, clinical nursing practice, gave meaning to the above for me. Over the years in nursing conferences I had been told my grasp of nursing situations was intuitive. Most times this was offered rather disparagingly although the nursing ou