Synopses & Reviews
Sarah Boxer's charming first book is a series of cartoon case histories, an animal tour of all things Freudian. The tale begins when Mr. Bunnyman runs into Dr. Floyd's office to hide from a wolf that is chasing him, and Floyd, a classic pipe-smoking analyst, insists that Bunnyman's problem is psychological that he is not actually being chased but is having paranoid fantasies. Enter Dr. Floyd's next patient, Mr. Wolfman, a swaggering cross-dresser with a hysterical female alter ego called Lambskin (who soon insists on being treated by Floyd, too). Ratma'am rounds out the Floydian client list: she's an obsessive-compulsive pack rat who likes giving orders and being spanked.
Drawn with a whimsical hand and complete with notes about the Freudian sources to which these archives pay affectionate tribute, the adventures of these animals reveal both the unintended comedy of Freuds case histories and their psychic depths.
Review
"The ingenious Sarah Boxer has charmingly and with great fun assembled a furred and feathered repertory company, and has provided them with comic scenes that will keep you eavesdropping on their analytic sessions for many seasons." Edward Koren
Review
"As the story unfolded, it got funnier and funnier, and funnier, and funnier. Suddenly it was very painful." David Levine
Review
"This is a very odd little book of cartoons by New York Times critic and reporter Sarah Boxer....It's hard to believe that Dr. Floyd helps much, with his crude, inflexible Freudian interpretations, especially since his patients beasts, after all seem quite free of repression. But his adventures are irresistible, and for those who want a gloss on the various jokes about Freud and his famous patients, Boxer helpfully provides smoking pipes in relevant panels referring readers to her endnotes." Laura Miller, Salon.com
Review
"Sarah Boxer's In the Floyd Archives, a smart, droll, original series of interconnected cartoons, does not fit easily into an existing literary compartment....Boxer's visual style...is airy, witty, and well suited to her subject matter." M. G. Lord, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Part critical gloss on actual Freudian case histories, part postmodern humor, and partly a very funny and silly series of cartoon strips." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Sarah Boxer was born in Denver, Colorado, and earned her B.A. in philosophy at Harvard. She is a critic and reporter at The New York Times, where she writes about photography, psychoanalysis, art, animals, philosophy, and other subjects. At the age of eleven she published her first cartoon and at fifteen she began reading Freud. She lives with her husband in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.