JEAN WATSON Importance of caring-healing consciousness within the human-
Transpersonal Caring Theory environment field
 Caring is independent of curing
 Advocates the postmodern view of science as
indistinguishable from art and a vision of nursing as a
discipline devoted to caring, health, and healing
Philosophical Background:
 Transcendental phenomenology
 Philosophical belief:
o Whitehead
o Kierkegaard
o deChardin
Psychologist:
Carl Rogers
 Nurse theorists:
• Nightingale
• Henderson
• Leininger
• Rogers
• Eastern views on the
importance of mind/body harmony
Major Conceptual Elements of the theory:
I. Transpersonal Caring Relationship
• Human to human connectedness
occurring in a nurse-patient encounter
• Not bounded by time and space
• A nurse enters into “ the life space
or phenomenal field of another person and is able to
detect the person’s condition of being, feels this
condition within self, and responds in such a way
that the person being cared for has a release of
feelings, thought, and tension”
II. Ten Carative Factors
1. forming a humanistic-altruistic system of
values
2. enabling and sustaining faith-hope
3. being sensitive to self and others
4. developing a helping-trusting, caring
relationship
5. promoting and accepting the expression of
positive and negative feelings and emotions
6. engaging in creative, individualized, problem-
solving caring processes
7. promoting transpersonal teaching-learning
8. attending to supportive, protective, and/or
corrective mental, physical, societal, and
spiritual environments
9. assisting with gratification of basic human
needs while preserving human dignity and
wholeness
10. allowing for, and being open to, existential-
phenomenological and spiritual dimensions of
caring and healing that cannot be fully
explained scientifically through Western
Medicine
Caring occasion/caring moment
• Whenever the nurse and others come
together with their unique life stories and
phenomenal field in human to human
transaction
Dimensions of the theory:
Embodied spirit
Expanded views of self and person
Consciousness as energy
Phenomenal field/ unitary consciousness
Advanced caring-healing modalities/ nursing arts
Nursing Metaparadigm: Watson
Person
• A fully functional integrated self greater than
and different from the sum of his or her parts
• Transcendent nature of being human
• Connectedness of all of existence
Health and Illness
Illness
 perceived state
rather than presence of disease
 Can result from a
troubled inner soul
 Can lead to disease
• Health
 Refers to unity and
harmony within the mind, body, and
soul
 Associated with the
degree of congruence between the
self as perceived and the self as
experienced
Environment
• Considered in the context of a human-
environment field (subject-object-person-
environment-nature-universe)
Nursing
 Nurse
• Nurse-noun and verb
• To nurse- carried out through human care
and caring (moral ideal of nursing)
 Protect, enhance, and
preserve humanity
 Help another gain
self-knowledge, control and self-
healing
 Nursing
• Both scientific and
artistic
• As a profession,
“nursing exists in order to sustain caring, healing,
and health where, and when, they are threatened
biologically, institutionally, environmentally, or
politically, by local, national, or global influences”
• The physical body is
cared for, but the care is never separated from the
context of the unity of the mind, body, and spirit
 Nursing interventions/
human care processes
Related through the goals:
o Mental-
spiritual growth for self and
others
o Find
meaning in one’s own existence
and experiences
o Discover
inner power and control
o Potentiate
instances of transcendence and
self-healing
Requires a wide scope of knowledge of:
• Hu
man behaviour and human responses to
actual or potential health problems
• In
dividual needs
• Ho
w to respond to other’s needs
• Ou
r strengths and limitations
• W
ho the other person is…strengths and
limitations, the meaning of the situation
for him/her
• Ho
w to comfort, offer compassion and
empathy

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