nurses simply take for granted, such as, hospital noises or odors, touching, bathing, feeding, sleep or meal schedules, may have very different meaning for individual patients. They may or may not be experienced as nurturing in a particular person's lived world.

In the humanistic perspective the nurse also is viewed as a human person, as a being in a body rather than merely as a function or a doer of activities. Conscious recognition of this fact opens many areas for exploration. Obviously, the nurse's actions (her being with and doing with), that affect the patient's world, are expressed through her body. How is nurturance communicated and actually effected through nursing activities? From the other side, consider the nurse as being affected by the world through her body. What depths of "nursing content" could we fathom if we accepted the existential dictum that "the body knows?" Would we dismiss so lightly those gems of clinical wisdom nurses attribute disparagingly to "gut reaction," "unscientific intuition," or "years of experience"? Would we value serious exploration and extraction of these natural resources in the nursing world?

The framework suggests, further, the possibilities of exploring the development of human potential, both patient's and nurse's, as it occurs in the unique domain of nursing's intersubjective transactions. What human resources are called forth in the shared situations during which nurses coexperience and cosearch with patients the varied meanings of being and becoming over the entire range of life from birth to death? How does it occur? What is the process? What promotes well-being or becoming more when facing life, suffering, death? For the patient? For the nurse? What knowledge gained through the study of nursing, a particular form of the human situation, could be contributed to the general body of human sciences?

Finally, within this framework, all the phenomena experienced in the nursing situation could be explored in relation to their attributes of time and space. More specifically, from an existential perspective, the focus would be directed toward the significance of lived time and space, that is, time and space as experienced by the patient and/or the nurse, and as shared intersubjectively. For example, waiting, silence, chronicity, emergency, positioning a patient in bed, moving through space in a wheelchair, crutchwalking, pacing, could be considered from the standpoint of the patient's experienced space and time, or from the nurse's, or as a shared event. Explorations of this kind could provide valuable insights into important nursing phenomena, such as, presence, empathy, comfort, timing. {20}

The human situation, then, is the ground within which nursing takes form. As such, it provides a framework for approaching the study and development of humanistic nursing. As an angular view, it holds the focus on the basic question underlying nursing practice: Is this particular intersubjective, transactional nursing event humanizing or dehumanizing?

CONCLUSION

This chapter explored the foundations of humanistic nursing. The discussion flowed naturally, perhaps unavoidably, into the realm of meta-nursing. "Naturally," for the humanistic nursing approach is itself an outgrowth of the critical examination of nursing as an experienced phenomenon. From this existential perspective of nursing as a living human act, the meaning of nursing is found in the act itself, in nursing's relation to its human context.

Reflection on nursing as it is lived in the real world revealed its existential, nurturing, intersubjective, transactional character. The process of humanistic nursing stemming from the nurse's authentic commitment is a kind of being with and doing with. It aims at the development of human potential through inter subjectivity and responsible choosing.

The actualization of humanistic nursing is dependent on the concurrent development of its practice and theoretical foundations by practicing nurses. An open framework derived from the human situation was offered to suggest possible dimensions of humanistic nursing practice that could be described and articulated into a body of theory.

Nurses who have considered this humanistic nursing approach in terms of their daily practice have felt at home in the ideas. The conceptualizations fit their personal nursing experience. If there is any strangeness in the approach, it is perhaps that it does not follow the contours of the clinical specialties to which we have grown so accustomed that they may be more ruts than roads. This is not to say that humanistic nursing is opposed to clinical specialization in nursing. In fact, clinical nursing, as it exists in any form, is its very heart and base. Humanistic nursing is not compartmentalized into clinical (or functional, or sociocultural) specialties because it applies in all clinical areas. It is, in the most basic sense, cross-clinical. This may be the great advantage of humanistic nursing. By orienting its explorations ontologically, it may foster genuine cross-clinical studies of nursing phenomena. If nurses with highly developed abilities in particular forms of nursing would struggle together in collaborative cross-clinical studies of nursing phenomena, specialization would serve to advance rather than fragment all nursing.