Early Social Interaction: A Case Comparison of Developmental Pragmatics and Psychoanalytic Theory

When a young child begins to engage in everyday interaction, she has to acquire competencies that allow her to be oriented to the conventions that inform talk-in-interaction and, at the same time, deal with emotional or affective dimensions of experience. The theoretical positions associated with these domains - social-action and emotion - provide very different accounts of human development and this book examines why this is the case. Through a longitudinal video-recorded study of one child learning how to talk, Michael A. Forrester develops proposals that rest upon a comparison of two perspectives on everyday parent-child interaction taken from the same data corpus - one informed by conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, the other by psychoanalytic developmental psychology. Ultimately, what is significant for attaining membership within any culture is gradually being able to display an orientation towards both domains - doing and feeling, or social-action and affect.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; 2. Developmental pragmatics and conversation analysis; 3. Child-focused conversation analysis; 4. A psychoanalytic reading of early social relations; 5. Repression and displacement in everyday talk-in-interaction; 6. Research practices and methodological objects; 7. Learning how to repair; 8. Learning what not to say: repression and interactive vertigo; 9. A question of answering; 10. Interaction and the transitional space; 11. Self-positioning, membership and participation; 12. Discourses of the self and early social relations; 13. Social practice and psychological affect.

About the Author :
Michael A. Forrester is a Reader in Psychology at the University of Kent. His academic interests are in child development and language and, particularly, children's developing conversational skills.

Review :
'Forrester is to be congratulated for orchestrating a fruitful dialogue between two apparently incompatible voices: the ethnomethodologist and the psychoanalyst. The result is a sparklingly original account of the interplay between what the child does and what the child feels. This is an empirically-based, scholarly tour de force that will fascinate anyone interested in how children develop behaviourally, cognitively and emotionally.' Charles Antaki, Loughborough University 'By deftly and conscientiously applying two very distinct paradigms, the author generates perspectives on early social interaction which are strikingly intricate in both depth and detail: features that are arguably lacking from the majority of accounts of such phenomena. In my mind, this is the most original and invigorating work on young children's language and emotional development of the past decade.' Tom Muskett, Lecturer and Speech and Language Therapist, University of Sheffield 'In his inimitable style Forrester brings together very different strands of thought and inquiry - from pragmatism, ethnomethodology and participant-observation to culture and selfhood - in this intriguing and entertaining book. With the unusual use of one child's recorded speech over a long period of time, the book makes an important contribution to the field of language and self development.' Vasudevi Reddy, University of Portsmouth '… a novel approach to examining a child's entrance into the social world … Recommended.' J. F. Heberle, Choice