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Lynne Layton's Who's that Girl? Who's that Boy? Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory offers an excellent example of combining and relating postmodern theories of identity and gender with relational theories of psychoanalysis. This work argues that a needed dialogue between postmodern theorists and psychoanalytic practitioners has not occurred because postmodern thinkers have tended to concentrate on abstract conceptions of social subjection and have thus ignored the ways that social constructions are internalized through meaningful relationships. Layton also points out that many object relations psychoanalysts have often neglected the ways that culture shapes all relationships and identity formations (11). In order to overcome this blockage of dialogue, Layton concentrates on the different and similar ways that these two approaches deal with the questions of subjectivity, agency, gender identity, narcissism, and development.
In her Introduction, she points out that postmodern and relational theorists often combine and confuse the definitions of the self, the individual, and the ego (12). She posits that postmodernists see all of these categories of agency as narcissistic constructs (12). In order to support this point, Layton turns to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage as a postmodern example of the equation between the formation of the narcissistic ego and the structure of the self and individual. She points out how Lacan and other postmodern thinkers connect this narcissistic self/individual/ego to a theory of social subjectivity grounded on the subject's need to encounter a loss of narcissism through the acceptance of social and linguistic castration: “A Lacanian clinician, then, as well as a Lacanian critic, figures the cure to the ego's narcissism to be the acceptance of the condition of lack” (13). This reading of Lacan's conception of analysis is centered on the movement from the narcissistic ego to the subject of linguistic castration and thus rei