In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary

By Sarah Boxer

Book Overview

In the Floyd Archives is a cartoon novel (with footnotes ) lightly based on Freud's famous case histories - the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Dora and Little Hans. But in this wildly inventive comic, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375714421
• ISBN13: 9780375714429
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Pantheon
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Comedy with footnotes

Sarah Boxer is a staff writer at the New York Times who has covered the cultural beatfor the past few years, often with dry humor. In her career at the paper, she has donealmost 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 acoffee table book, but a volume designed perhaps for the smaller kind of end tables tobe 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 subconsciouslevel 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 otheranimals.If IN THE FLOYD ARCHIVES is comedy with footnotes, the type of clever noveltythat 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, andread Freud as a teenager growing up in Denver, Colorado. There, she would leafthrough her father's copies of the New Yorker, no doubt reading the cartoons, heronly direct exposure to East Coast intellectualism prior to the undergraduate degree inPhilosophy from Harvard that resulted in her transplantation to the East. (Shecurrently divides her time between New York City and Cambridge, Massachussetts.)[from The Idler, http://www.the-idler.com]

Originally crafted brain food

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.

Get Lost in This Amazing Archive

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.