ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book claims for nurses a key role in achieving that re-introduction - deploying a specific kind of technique at a particular moment in the clinical process. It discusses the philosophical and developmental underpinnings of clinical process and illustrates its use with examples drawn from a variety of care settings. Rooted in metaphor, symbol, reference, and analogy, they harnessed the creative and imaginative tools and aesthetic attitude of the artist and the poet rather than the methods more conventionally associated with professional nursing-care planning and understandings of patient care needs. All the more so in psychiatric nursing, where our patients' mysterious, sometimes disturbing gestures and psychotic delusions challenge us to reach into the deepest inner dictionaries of connectivity and understanding. Gestural bridges are sensory-based play activities which cast psychological ideas in an analogic physical form.
