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Sarah Boxer has added two books to the list of graphic novels that take psychoanalysis as their subject: In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary (, reissued in ) and Mother May I? A Post-Floydian Folly . Boxer, a former New York Times staff writer, editor at The New York Times Book Review, and contributor to The Atlantic, Slate, Artforum, and other publications, does nothing short of embodying—in fact, giving animal bodies to—a pantheon of iconic psychoanalytic characters and the love-hate relationships they bring to life, all presented rather dreamily as simple, lightly rendered line sketches.
On the first page of In the Floyd Archives, we meet Dr. Floyd, a bird who is not so much Freud as one of Freud's most obstinately devoted disciples, and four of his analysands: Mr. Bunnyman, who learns to be deeply devoted to an oedipal fixation; Mr. Wolfman, dressed up as a lamb by his father when young and struggling with passive-aggressive ambivalence about being a “real” wolf; Lambskin, Mr. Wolfman's depressed alter ego who cannot move on her own; and finally Rat Ma'am, a thieving rat living in filth—as rats do—with a compulsion to bathe frequently and to steal from and present things to Dr. Floyd.
It is never quite clear whether each character is a dissociated identity of Mr. Bunnyman or if they are in fact separate characters. If the former is the case, this would help us make sense of Dr. Floyd's constant dismissal of the characters' descriptions of the things that plague them in their lives