ABSTRACT
Each nurse must face and, in some way, resolve a painful conflict over accepting the responsibilities of her role.The nursing task tends to evoke a strong sense of responsibility in nurses, and nurses often discharge their duties at considerable personal cost. On the other hand, the heavy burden of responsibility is difficult to bear consistently, and nurses are tempted to give it up. In addition, each nurse has wishes and impulses that would lead to irresponsible actions, e.g. to scamp boring, repetitive tasks or to become libidinally or emotionally attached to patients.The balance of opposing forces in the conflict varies between individuals, i.e. some are naturally ‘more responsible’ than others, but the conflict is always present.To experience this conflict fully and intrapsychically would be extremely stressful.The intrapsychic conflict is alleviated, at least as far as the conscious experience of nurses are concerned, by a technique that partly converts it into an interpersonal conflict. People in certain roles tend to be described as ‘responsible’ by themselves and to some extent by others, and in other roles people are described as ‘irresponsible’. Nurses habitually complain that other nurses are irresponsible, behave carelessly and impulsively, and in consequence must be ceaselessly supervised and disciplined.The complaints commonly refer not to individuals or to specific incidents but to whole categories of nurses, usually a category junior to the speaker.The implication is that the juniors are not only less responsible now than the speaker, but also less responsible than she was when she was in the same junior position. Few nurses recognise or admit such tendencies. Only the most junior nurses are likely to admit these tendencies in themselves and then justify them on the grounds that everybody treats them as though they were irresponsible. On the other
hand, many people complain that their seniors as a category impose unnecessarily strict and repressive discipline, and treat them as though they have no sense of responsibility.21 Few senior staff seem able to recognise such features in their own behaviour to subordinates. Those ‘juniors’ and ‘seniors’ are, with few exceptions, the same people viewed from above or below, as the case may be.
