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}