Abstract: This thesis presents the job of psychiatric nursing from the nurse's point of view, as derived from the author's personal experience and from interviews with thirty five other staff within a particular psychiatric institution.The first part of the thesis is reconstructed narrative account of an afternoon and a day shift in an acute admission ward. In the second part, the basic situation on the ward and some of the exigencies of nurse-patient and nurse-staff relations are discussed from structuralist and strategic conduct perspectives.The discussion that follows Anthony Giddens' (1976, 1979, 1984) conceptual framework of power, legitimation and signification, with particular attention to the strategic implications of ward routines, nursing practices, and interpersonal relations, as well as the duality of clinical and moralistic interpretive themes. The third part of the thesis 'the nurse's progress' over time. Characteristic changes in understanding and awareness take place with the movement from the 'backwards' to the 'acute' area and from the student to staff nurse. This is portrayed as a 'moral career' analogous to that suggested by Goffman (1968) for psychiatric patients; marked by 'happenings' that generate revised conceptions of self and others, and including those experiences of duality and contradiction discussed in part Two. While acknowledging the diversity of nurses' attitudes and approaches, with variations according to individual temperament, past experiences and the current setting, the suggestion is made of a common and distinctive 'meta-awareness' that develops with the fob