DEL I På tröskeln in… - Doria

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The material used here was two works by the Swedish author Lars Gyllensten. These texts,
which can be described as philosophy in literary form, focus vital items in connecting the state of
dependence of the human being, as well as his/her being in the world. The goal was to clarify the
characteristics of the very inside of the concept when it is shaped in relation to the human being
on encountering mental and spiritual suffering. The horizon of interpretation consists here of
Eriksson’s theory of suffering, Eriksson’s ontological health model as well as the basic
assumptions. 589
In the third phase of the hermeneutical spiral of exploration, an interview study was conducted.
The focus of the study was directed towards the phenomenon of space as it is known by a patient
in a landscape of psychiatric care, i.e. what the space is in a contextual meaning on the empirical
level. As a phenomenon the space contains different qualities, relationships, events, thoughts,
images, memories, fantasies, feelings, acts and so on, which a human being is experiencing in
relation to it. The data was concluded by tape-recorded dialogues with 6 patients in a context of
psychiatric care. This creation of meaning is presented on the ontic level of contextual and
existential patterns as well as on the ontological level including adductive assumptions about
what the content of space is. Then, a gradual hermeneutic understanding of the space was
attempted by using theories from the caring science as well as additional theories 590 from other
disciplines in cases where they seemed to support the interpretation and get the understanding on
a deeper level. The condition that had to be filled was that they were congruent with caring
science. By so doing, the interpretation was explicitly conducted through an oscillation between
empiricism and theory.
Metaphors have been used as they are vivid and expressive tools for generating
meaning. In their
capacity
to point “beyond description”, metaphors can serve as a bridge to ineffable, and often
unseen, elements of the world of caring. Different metaphorical space formations depict here a
variety of purports that, although not quite the same, share extensive elements. Fundamental
patterns, finally, were pointed out when the actual pattern comprises the totality of a certain
589 Eriksson 1993b, Eriksson et al. 1995, Eriksson 2001a.
590 Bauman 1995, companied with Bachelard 2002 and Herakleitos 1997.