In humanistic nursing existential awareness calls for an authenticity
with one's self. As a visionary aim, such authenticity,
self-in-touchness, is more than what usually is termed intellectual
awareness. Auditory, olfactory, oral, visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and
visceral responses are involved and each can convey unique meaning to
man's consciousness. In-touchness with these sensations and our
responses informs us about our quality of being, our thereness, our
degree of presence with others. The kind of "between" we live with
others depends on both our degree of awareness and the meaning we
attribute to this awareness. This awareness, reflected on, sometimes
shared with a responsible other for reality testing, offers us
opportunity for broadening our meaning base, for becoming more--more in
accord with our potential for humanness.
Perhaps a statement made by Dr. Gene Phillips, professor of education at
Boston University, will clarify the importance I attach to each nurse
becoming as much as she can be. He said, "The more mature we are the
less it is necessary for us to exclude." Presently I would paraphrase
this statement {5} and say, the more of ourselves we do not have to
exclude, the more of the other we can be open to. Our self-awareness,
in-touchness, self-acceptance, actualization of our potential allows us
to share with others so they can become in relationship with us.
In this kind of existential relating, presence with another, a nurse is
confronted with man as singular in his own peculiar angular, biased, or
shaded reality. It becomes apparent that each has his very own lived
world. So one might describe human existence as man-world as some refer
to man as mind-body, using a hyphen rather than "and." Man's universal
species commonality and peculiar perplexing noncommonality, has this
manness, affect and constantly interplay with one another. This arena of
interplay is complicated further by man's capacity for nondeterminedness,
his ability for envisioning and considering a variety of alternatives
and choosing selectively. Often these alternatives are experienced as
contradictory and inconsistent. Humanistic nursing calls forth in the
nurse the struggle of recognizing the complexity of men's relating in
the nursing world as "just how man is" and his nature, his human
condition, as searching, experiencing, and an unfolding becoming.