Early social interaction: a case comparison of developmental pragmatics and psychoanalytic theory

Abstract

This book brings together various threads of the research work I have been involved with over a number of years. This research is based on a longitudinal video recorded study of one ofmydaughters as shewas learning howto talk. The impetus for engaging in this work arose from a sense that within developmental psychology and child language, when people are interested in understanding howchildren use language, they seem over-focused or concerned with questions of formal grammar and semantics. My interest is on understanding how a child learns to talk and through this process is then understood as being or becoming a member of a culture. When a young child is learning how to engage in everyday interaction she has to acquire those competencies that allow her to be simultaneously oriented to the conventions that inform talk-ininteraction and at the same time deal with the emotional or affective dimensions of her experience. It turns out that in developmental psychology these domains are traditionally studied separately or at least by researchers whose interests rarely overlap. In order to understand better early social relations (parent–child interaction), I want to pursue the idea that we will benefit by studying both early pragmatic development and emotional development. Not surprisingly, the theoretical positions underlying the study of these domains provide very different accounts of human development and this book illuminates why this might be the case. What follows will I hope serve as a case-study on the interdependence between the analysis of social interaction and subsequent interpretation.

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