In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary

Rating:
Summary: Get Lost in This Amazing Archive
Review: Sarah Boxer has a gift for twists, turns, ins and outs of an outrageous set of characters. Floyd is to comic culture what jazz was to Mondrian -- inventive, subversive and inspiring. How could a journalist from the NY Times have such a fertile mind and imagination to put this work together?? Moneyman, through his depression and search for his mom, is hilarilously drawn, phyically and in character. If you like Thurber or Spiegelman, this one's for you.

Rating:
Summary: Comedy with footnotes
Review: Sarah Boxer is a staff writer at the New York Times who has covered the cultural beat
for the past few years, often with dry humor. In her career at the paper, she has done
almost everything, from writing obituaries to working as an editor of the Book Review. Her new paperback, IN THE FLOYD ARCHIVES: A PSYCHO-BESTIARY, is not a
coffee table book, but a volume designed perhaps for the smaller kind of end tables to
be found psychiatric waiting rooms.
By creating "Bunnyman" as a patient (and apparent alter-ego) seeing "Dr. Floyd,"
Boxer takes on classic Freudian concepts, lampooning (yet perhaps at a subconscious
level paying tribute to) the power and influence of psychoanalytic thought and practice.
In another sense, it is about the conflict between the rational Ego represented by Dr.
Floyd, and the instinctual Id represented by Bunnyman, as well as a series of other
animals.
If IN THE FLOYD ARCHIVES is comedy with footnotes, the type of clever novelty
that might appeal to fans of early Woody Allen or Jules Feiffer, it is not surprising,
since Boxer says she published her first cartoon at the precocious age of eleven, and
read Freud as a teenager growing up in Denver, Colorado. There, she would leaf
through her father's copies of the New Yorker, no doubt reading the cartoons, her
only direct exposure to East Coast intellectualism prior to the undergraduate degree in
Philosophy from Harvard that resulted in her transplantation to the East. (She
currently divides her time between New York City and Cambridge, Massachussetts.)
[from The Idler, http://www.the-idler.com]

Rating:
Summary: Originally crafted brain food
Review: This is a truly original look at Freudian psychology whose very title obviously comes from Janet Malcolm's In The Freud Archives, published several years ago and excerpted in The New Yorker. It's a wonderful, entertaining, parody on core Freud. There is a serious and highly educational message in this work, but it doesn't take itself with the typical, ponderous seriousness that afflicts other work on the subject. Boxer would make one great teacher.