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

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.