Seeing Blindness: A Combined Psychodynamic and Interactional Approach to the Study of Ignoring

This note addresses how ignoring may be investigated as an interactional phenomenon. Ignoring-related practices can be stated to produce absences in the data rather than presences. Thus, their scrutiny poses challenges for analysts. We argue that inspiration can be found in Billig’s work, which leverages a relational understanding of unconscious processes combined with the close attention to interactional details associated with the conversation analytical approach. We conceptualize the practices of ignoring through the psychodynamic concept of blindness to demonstrate the combined approach in an exemplary analysis of data obtained from an emergency call center.