In years past as a public health mental health psychiatric nurse I have
structured facts about 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.