So often nurses, even nurses who know that their clinical expertise grew out of their practice, hesitate to share their nursing experiences. They are apt to say deprecatingly, "Oh, that's _only_ my _personal_ experience." Yet that is precisely where the value lies, in the uniqueness of human experience. Since each nurse's description of her nursing experience is a glimpse of a real nursing world, the views cannot justifiably be judged as right or wrong; they simply are. Once the various views are expressed, they can be compared and contrasted, not for the purpose of accepting some and rejecting others but rather in the interest of clarifying each in relation to the other. Such a dialogue of experientially based conceptualizations can result in a complementary synthesis. The process calls for not only a true appreciation of personal experience by each nurse but also commitment to a collaborative effort of open sharing by a genuine community of nurses. This view, that the development of humanistic nursing practice theory is a dialogical process, has led to our valuing (in fact, insisting on) the description {78} of nursing phenomena. We see phenomenological description as a basic and essential step in theory building. Indeed, considering the "state-of-the-art" of nursing theory development, it is the most crucial and immediate need. Looking back at the historical evolvement of our humanistic nursing approach, it is obvious that we had been using and developing a phenomenological approach for a number of years before we graced our efforts with the impressive label, "Phenomenological Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing," in a course offered to a group of nurses at Northport Veterans Administration Hospital in April 1972. Although we were aware much earlier that our interests and work were flowing in the general stream of phenomenology, we usually refrained from using the label because it did little to clarify our position.[1] The term has grown less precise with the extension of its use in different disciplines and with variations in methodology. When we began applying the term "phenomenological" to our work, we learned that to many persons it sounds strange, unpronounceable, foreign; to some forbidding; to others enticing. We later coined the title "humanistic nursing" as being more suitable for it encompasses our general existential bent. However, this change in title does not imply any abandonment of our phenomenological approach. The description of nursing phenomena is as highly prized now as ever. In humanistic nursing, phenomenological and existential currents interrelate. Having an existential view of nursing as a living dialogue influences which phenomena one becomes aware of, experiences, values, studies, and describes. Reciprocally, as one discovers and struggles to describe and develop meaningful ways of describing nursing phenomena, the lived nursing dialogue itself will be continually perfected.