Humanistic Nursing, Loretta T. Zderad [ebook reader for comics .txt] 📗

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 to the existentialist thinking of persons like Martin Buber, Teilhard de Chardin, Frederick Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Hermann Hesse, Wilfrid Desan, and Norman Cousins. Now when I think of the phenomena—man, family, community—Theresa G. Muller, nurse educator and clinician, who quoted Hersey from his novel, A Single Pebble, comes to mind.[3] He said, "I approached the river as a dry scientific problem; I found it instead an avenue along which human beings moved whom I had not the insight, even though I had the vocabulary, to understand." I consider my greatest gifts as a human being nurse my ability to relate to other man, to wonder, search, and imagine about my experience, and to create out of what I come to know. My ever developing internalized community of world thinkers dynamically interrelated with my conscious awareness of my experienced nursing realm allows my appreciation of my human gifts and the ever enrichment of myself as a "knowing place."

NURSE: EXPERIENCE INTERNALIZED

Nursing experience taught me that each man, each family, each community was at once alike and different. Hesse, an existential novelist, in Steppenwolf, {40} describes each man who has become in family and community as like an onion with hundreds of integuments or a texture with many threads.[4] Then man's differences would be in the quality of his integuments and their development or in his threads in their preponderance. Contemplating the struggles in community regarding mutual understanding, I expanded Hesse's conception of man and found my vision of community to be a salad tossing or a patchwork quilt tumble drying.

Valuing the complexity of this conception of man and therefore of community I find myself smiling at the naivety of the earlier more static frames of order I superimposed on these phenomena. These oversimplifications maintained the shade through which I viewed my world. The shade was: others are knowing places, they are responsible; therefore if I quote authority from outside of myself, I can speak with certainty about what I know and believe and no one can attack me. And yet, my unique knowledge was not given and so my defense, my clutching at security foiled my human need for conceptualization of and expression of my own nurse vision of reality. This defeated the development by me of nursing theory.

Now I realize how I underestimated the potentialities of my nursing effect, of the difference I made, and could make. Just consider the given human uniqueness of each participant in the nursing situation whose familial potential goes back to an origin of thinking being or consciousness, and forward to his anticipation of the future, his eternity.

In the nursing literature, it is rather infrequent that we philosophically share our innermost thoughts, dreams, ideals, and strivings without a strong overlay of indoctrination or conversion. Nietzsche presents philosophy as autobiographical, such sharing does not offer maps. It could offer relevant resources and stimulate other nurses to influence the shape and becoming of the profession.

This chapter attempts to discuss ideas of community, the macrocosm, by considering man, the microcosm, as he develops in family and community. The ideas represent my "here and now" as it reflects my past and anticipated nursing world, including my hopes and expectations.

Man's Experience

Each human being carries a view of persons, families, and communities shaded by the views of his nuclear family. The past usually is corrected; it is never erased. So in his family of origin man internalizes ideas of "right-wrong," "appropriate-inappropriate," "expected-unexpected." Each family's shaded world echoes its procreators' familial, psychosocialeconomic, religious and experiential breadth, closely resembled or distorted. Two persons, perhaps more, usually husband and wife, bring shaded views together in some combination or balance that becomes the "stuff," the authority, of {41} their children's worlds. Thus, children see their early worlds through the complementariness and conflict of this initial home view, acting at times with it; at times against it.

Adults, in response to and through one another, procreate new sensitive beings whom they want and/or do not want and whom they may and/or may not experience as their responsibility in varying degrees. Marcel, a French existentialist philosopher, views procreation and responsible parenthood as quite different. My past nursing experience substantiates this. Marcel expresses my bias about responsible parenthood, and this statement is also worthy of consideration by nurses in positions of authority to others. He says, "We have to lay down the principle that our children (or those for whom we care) are destined, as we are ourselves, to render a special service, to share in a work, we have humbly to acknowledge that we cannot conceive of this work in its entirety and that a fortiori we are incapable of knowing or imagining how it is destined to shape itself for the young will, it is our province to awaken to a consciousness of itself."[5] Think of this statement of responsible authority. How has it been evidenced in families and nursing situations of your nursing world? What are your expectations of your patients or nurses with whom you work?

Teilhard de Chardin, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, like Nietzsche, depicts man as lacking a fixed nature with his own mode of being as his fundamental project.[6] Initially, each person takes on a mode of being in his world dependent upon his degree of freedom and the how and what of the world as presented by his family and perceived by him. The world as presented is reflective of the family's culture, their provincial world view, their unique experienced "here and now," and the times. Metaphorically, the family's lived world, how they experience at this particular cross-section of their lives, can be symbolically described as a kaleidoscopic telescoping of its past and anticipated future. Now, this would be what was presented at any particular time. What would a child's perception do to this metaphorical symbol? The child's current human development and his narrow experience would be like a circus house mirror that would interpret the metaphorical symbol distortedly. Witness a three-year-old speaking questioningly and complainingly about her tension headache to her mute, nonperceptive doll, and asking her to please, please stop making such a mess and racket.

The earliest childhood views of family and community are influenced over time, gradually and abruptly, and grow in complexity. The child's puzzlement is aroused by others' comings and goings, happenings within the family, immediate neighborhood, and adjacent community, and the world presented through books and technologically, on radio, television, and tape recorder. Each child attends these presentations with varying measures of complacency, questioning, bafflement, and involvement.

{42}

For instance, for myself, as a child there was the excitement of the construction of a new house in the woods next door and meeting new neighbors. Initially my parents expressed their differences from ourselves. The differences they perceived were followed by negative projections on these unknown folk. Were these others really humanly different? I investigated; my family investigated. The folk became persons. They expressed themselves differently in volume and sometimes in language. They looked different. Yet they were not fearsome. They felt, cared, responded, and worried much as we did. Mutual knowledge allowed increasing closeness and liking.

Forbidden! This was the neighborhood across the tracks. I cried when an uncle teasingly proclaimed one day that my missing mother was over there. Later I attended school with both white and black children who lived over there. And again, each was different, yet not different; each was knowable, likeable, and loveable.

Adult family members whispered about a neighbor woman from across the street. She was apparently hospitalized permanently. When I inquired as to why, eyebrows were raised and strange looks were exchanged. I was told in a not believable way, "She broke her leg falling off the back porch."

A neighbor husband and wife frequently could be heard fighting both verbally and physically. Family talk at our house depicted the husband as "evil," the wife as a "poor soul." I did not enjoy being in these peoples' house. Perhaps the violence frightened me; perhaps I was uncertain when it might erupt? Perhaps I was concerned that I might one day somehow become part of such a situation? Now, looking back over the years, I would guess that both this husband and wife were "poor souls" struggling with their humanness as best they could.

An adolescent girl lived down the block. She was labeled as "strange," "peculiar," "odd," "crazy." Often one saw her talking to herself, skipping and rotating as she moved along in her always solitary and mysterious way. All expressed great sorrow for her always solitary and mysterious way. All expressed great sorrow for her elderly mother and father on her admission to the "State Hospital." Years later I wondered, and still wonder what happened to that girl, herself? What kind of an existence has she experienced?

During these early years there was also separation from and loss of close loved family members. When I was three and a half a great aunt who always appreciated my side of things moved out of our home due to a family argument. Perhaps most confusing of all during these preschool years, at four and a half, my father died suddenly. "They" said that he went to heaven, that God called him. Why did he go? Why would he leave us? Most important how could he leave me? What had I done wrong? Was it that I had not loved him enough? Been good enough to him? Was he angry? What kind of God is God, anyway? Is he benevolent, malevolent, indifferent? Is he real: is he believable? What can one expect and how should one act toward authority and power? The world didn't feel like a very safe place nor did persons appear to be dependable.

Then there was school. With additional authorities and peers there arose new wonderment and expectation. The way one was to be in school was {43} different from at home. And what was happening at home while I was at school? Could I depend on things being safe? In kindergarten I made an ash tray of clay for my already dead father.

In my child world there were books, radio, and the movies. Today children experience these, as well as television and record players. For me, books, radio, and the movies brought into my world new aspects of fear, excitement, joy, love, horror, violence, imagination, and suspense. They depicted at times the ideal and at times the abysmal. Sometimes, despite everything, good triumphed. At other times regardless of the effort invested all was lost. Where was the harmony of logical reason? Is our world absurd? Are we absurd to respond to it with an expectation of reason?

For each child there are very special, long-remembered events: being taught to swim by one's father, family picnics, trips into the world beyond city or country, going to the circus, a world's fair, a zoo or a fantasy land. There, also are the events of being loved and loving deeply, linked somehow with times of feeling unloved and unloving.

More than earlier, today there are multiple community groups for children where activities are guided and supervised. Within these situations and in the free play of neighborhood children, there is always the confusing, enlightening, and frequently distorted information gained through discovering your relationship with both boys and girls. Exploration by children into their sexual similarities and differences, a healthy pursuit, in the past more than today often aroused parental furor. Furor and different reactions from different involved parents lead to further child confusion and focus.

Within childhood peer relations there are games, play, and schoolwork that allow the child to come to know personally the meanings and feelings of competing, collaborating, fighting,