Åbo Akademi University, Department of Caring Science

RICHARDSSON GUNILLA: Opening up a little world of meaning: defining the concept of communion from a Caring Science perspective Master’s thesis, 77 pages, 8 appendixes Supervisors: PhD Lisbet Lindholm PhD Anne Kasén May 2006

Keywords: Communion, union, caritative caring ethics, Eriksson’s model for concept analysis

The purpose of this study is to try to discover the meaning and nuances in significance of the concept communion through concept analysis and to thereafter identify the concept and its characteristics in nursing care in the study’s contextual analysis. The research question is “what is communion”.

The basis of the study’s analysis lies in Eriksson’s caring theories fourth axiom and thesis, that communion is the basis for all humanity. Human beings are fundamentally interrelated to an abstract and/or concrete other in a communion. Her thesis is that the caring communion forms the context of meaning of caring and derives its origin from the ethos of love, responsibility, and sacrifice, namely caritative ethics.

The study emanates from a hermeneutical horizon of understanding and derives its methodology and method from Eriksson’s model of concept analysis. The study’s semantic analysis is based on Koort and Eriksson. The contextual analysis of the characteristics observed when the context meaning context is related to caring occurs through the help of a patient diary.

In the study results, three attributes emerge from the dimensions of the concept analysis of communion. These three attributes are: the enclosing attribute, the transcendental attribute, and the relational attribute. A fourth attribute appeared in the analysis of the patient’s diary, the attribute that denotes communion’s unity in good and bad. The goal for human beings is to create a communion that contains the first three attributes and which is connected to caritative ethics and to help others find peace in such communion. When this occurs, human beings realize a communion that provides a secure relationship and in which the “other” perceives that he/she is worthy of another’s response and communion. If such communion is not achieved, it is possible that human beings will lack the energy/ability to reach others and will therefore be drawn towards the destructive side of communion. It is important to remember that communion is the basis for all humanity and that this even pertains to the destructive aspect of a unifying communion, expressed, for example, as both security and prison in the diary used in this study. This aspect of communion is quite ambivalent yet nonetheless part of the totality within communion; it unites in good and bad.