Early Social Interaction

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.

• 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.

'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