Process--Choice and Intersubjectivity For the process of nursing to be truly humanistic it must bear out, that is, be a lived expression of, the nurse's recognition and valuing of nursing as an opportunity for the development of the human person. To this end, humanistic nursing process echoes existential themes related to a person's becoming through choice and intersubjectivity. Existentially speaking, man is his choices. This does not mean that a man can be anything he chooses. Naturally, each individual is unique, having his own particular potentials and limitations. Nor is this view a denial of the forces of unconscious motivation and habit. It does not imply that all of a person's actions result from totally conscious deliberations. By saying, "I am my choices," I mean I am this here and now person because in my past life I took particular paths in preference to others; of the possibilities open to me, I actualized certain ones. In this sense, I am my history, I am what I am, what I have become. But I am also what I am not, what I have not become. I am a nurse, this unique here and now nurse with particular experience, knowledge, skills, and values; without other experience, knowledge, skills, and values. Through self-reflection I know that I have changed, I have experienced growth from within. I know myself as a being capable of becoming more, capable of actualizing my possibilities, my self. So I am my choices not only in terms of my past but also in regard to my future, my possibilities. Man is an individual being necessarily related to other men in time and space. As every man is beholden to other men for his birth and development, interdependence is inherent in the human situation. In this sense, human existence is coexistence. The deeper significance of this truth has been recognized and elucidated by many thinkers, especially those in the existential stream. Over {16} and over, their writings reveal the paradoxical tension of being human: each man is, at once, independent, a unique individual and interdependent, a necessarily related being. As Wilfrid Desan says, referring to man as subsistent relation, "He is towards-the-other but he is not-the-other."[1] Furthermore, as Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel maintain, it is actually through his relations with other men that a man becomes, that his unique individuality is actualized. To know myself as "individual" is to experience myself as this particular unique here-and-now person and other than that there-and-now person. Or in other words, to know myself as me is to see myself in relation to and distant from other selves. As Buber so beautifully states, "It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed."[2]