Author: Liesl Dentinger

by Liesl Dentinger

In my third year of undergraduate nursing school, I was assigned to an inpatient women’s trauma unit in a freestanding psychiatric hospital for a clinical rotation. The goal of this clinical experience was to engage in therapeutic communication with patients, a skillset very different from the physical assessments and medication administrations I learned in other rotations. What prepared me best for these patient encounters was not my previous nursing classes or clinical experience but rather the ability to listen in ways I developed while studying psychoanalytic theory in some non-nursing courses.

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