Immediately we are most grateful to the participants in the six humanistic nursing courses taught here at the Northport VAH. As nurses, they received and accepted our expressed ideas to the extent of testing them in the fires of their real lived nursing practice settings. While struggling with our ideas and us, they gave to us. They were supportive, loving, and truly present with us in the community of nurses at Northport, VAH. Miss Sue McCann, clinical nurse specialist, one of our first course participants, has read and reviewed our materials. More than this Miss McCann has been a counselor, resource person, and a dependable friend in our humanistic nursing effort of the last three years. We hope our chapters give back to others, at least just a part of what we have received from them in our travels in the nursing world. J.G.P L.T.Z. [Transcriber's Note: to the 1988 Edition Italic text has been marked as _text_. Bold text has been marked as ~text~. Obvious punctuation errors in the original have been corrected. Other corrections are noted at the end of the text. The original page numbers have been retained, e.g. {1} marks the start of page 1 in the original text.] HUMANISTIC NURSING _Josephine G. Paterson, DNSc, RN_ _Loretta T. Zderad, PhD, RN_ PREFACE Somewhere there's a child a crying Somewhere there's a child a crying Somewhere there's a child a crying Crying for freedom in South Africa.[1] But until someone hears the cry and responds, the child will continue to suffer the oppression of the current South African regime; and the world will continue to be less than it could be. To cry aloud when there seems no chance of being heard, belies a hope--perhaps an inherently human trait--that someone, somewhere, somehow will hear that cry and respond to it. This same hope, that someone would hear and respond, allowed existential psychologist Viktor Frankl to survive the systematic torture and degradation in Nazi death camps. As Frankl and others sought their way, they found meaning and salvation "through love and in love;" and by choosing to believe that "life still waited for him, that a human being waited for his return."[2] There is power in the call of one person and the potential response of another; and incredible power when the potential response becomes real. There is the power for each person to change as she becomes more than she was before the dialogue. There is the power to transcend the situation as two people engage the events that are whirling around them and together try to make sense of their worlds and find a meaning to their existence. When the call and response between two people is as honest as it can be, there is the revolutionary power which the poet Muriel Rukeyser speaks of: What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.[3] {iv}