ABSTRACT
Fifty years ago, Menzies (1959) published her paper on nurses’ anxiety 1 ; a paper that was to become a classic study of hospital nursing (Rafferty and Traynor 2002, Wiltshire and Parker 1996), being extensively cited in the nursing literature on the organization and practice of nursing (Rafferty and Traynor 2002). Menzies (1959) took a psychoanalytic perspective, arguing that the constant and close proximity of the sick patient was anxiety-provoking for nurses; the closer the relationship and the more concentrated it was, the more likelihood the experience of anxiety for the nurse.
