Abstract
Purpose: This study aimed to elucidate the characteristics of conscious and unconscious empathy that psychiatric nurses experience through their patient–nurse relationships in daily nursing practice.
Methods: Unstructured interviews were conducted with 30 psychiatric nurses who had ≥5 years of work experience. Nurses described relationships with patients that had deepened and left an impression on them. The data were analyzed within the framework of Benner’s interpretive phenomenology.
Results: Analysis on empathetic experiences of psychiatric nurses within their patient–nurse relationships interpreted 4 themes. The first 2 themes, concern about their relationship with patients and instinctual drive for understanding the patients and mutual effect between personality characteristics and life histories of patients and nurses, demonstrate nurses’ commitment and desire to relieve patients’ pain and negative feelings. The second 2 themes, feeling of a genuine connection with patients as confirmed through therapeutic effect and a lifelong bond surpassing time and space, demonstrate mutual understanding, sharing of joyous, tender, and unexpected moments, and feelings of security and satisfaction between nurses and patients.
Conclusion: These findings suggest that empathy experienced by psychiatric nurses through the patient–nurse relationship is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by only one particular scenario of nursing care, and is rather an experience acquired through the association between everyday nursing care and the time that nurses and patients are living in.
