Page 136 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

Fr om carative Fa c t o r 6 t o C ar it as ProC e s s 6
However, while nursing scholarship within a Caritas Model has
matured, Janice Muff’s earlier (1988) critique of nursing from an out-
side lens unfortunately still lingers in educational and practice mind-
sets; that is, authoritarianism has a strong tradition throughout nurs-
ing education and practice cultures. Her research found that nursing
instructors often believe and teach “that there is only one right way to
do things—their way.” As she viewed it, nursing creates self-imposed
restrictions on itself. For example, despite nursing faculty’s rhetoric
of developing autonomous professionals, agents of change, leaders,
and so on, nursing students are often rewarded more for obedience
and conformity than for assertiveness, questioning, and differences of
opinion (Watson 1999).
The often arbitrary, linear “nursing process” to which nurses have
historically subscribed as a formal procedure is too often presented as
a truism and the only way to problem solve, when in reality it does
not work that way. In fact, the nursing process is merely a common
problem-solving process that has been renamed and relabeled “nursing
process.” These identity and boundary structures create false bound-
aries and a false impression that nursing has some special approach to
problem solving (Muff 1988).
Nurses have a history of working from set roles and functions,
of fixed ways of being and doing, without those methods necessarily
being scientific or scholarly. In spite of advanced education, scholarly
practices, and role changes, today, in its own way, a robotic tendency
has emerged in the fast-paced institutional system, reinforcing the old
tendency to adhere to rigid technical mind-sets and medical-techno-
cure institutional demands. This habitual institutional mind-set hap-
pens without awareness, without pausing to critique, without bring-
ing one’s full consciousness and intentionality to bear on the use of
the available expanded knowledge, values, and human dynamics nec-
essary for a reflective practice model that embraces the best of both
science and art.
A glimpse into conventional nursing and nurse detachment in an
effort to be “professional” and in some instances “scientific,” which is
separate from a caring-healing relationship, is captured in Sylvia Plath’s
classic poem “Tulips,” which was written after she was hospitalized.

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