Sarah Boxer's Freudian Funnies By Jeet Heer The Comics Journal #244 (June 2002). Despite his reputation as a dour explorer of the human psyche, Sigmund Freud loved jokes of all sorts: riddles, puns, paradoxes and witty quips. So it is perhaps natural that among the artists who have been the most enriched by Freud's work are cartoonists, who have often found many laughs in the anxious encounter between psychologists and patients. The psychiatrists coach has long been a staple of the New Yorker gag but the real early masters of psychological humor were Charles Schulz, who had Lucy Van Pelt dispense rough advice for five cents a session, and Jules Feiffer whose explainers kept muttering therapeutic language in an unsuccessful attempt to cheer themselves up. More recently, Dan Clowes has often mocked the reductive and mechanical nature of classical psychology even as his characters enact the drama of the super-ego clamping down, often unsuccessfully, on the desires of the id. Sarah Boxer's In The Floyd Archives, therefore, belongs to a long tradition of Freudian funnies. Looking like a small sketchbook filled with doodles made during a long session with the shrink, Boxer's graphic novella traces the case history of four cartoon animals treated by a brainy bird, Doctor Floyd. The first patient we meet is Mr. Bunnyman, a terrified hare being chased by a wolf. "So you think you're being 'chased'?" Asks Dr. Floyd, who refuses to accept anything his patients say at face value. Mr. Bunnyman, in fact, was seeking refuge from the second patient, Mr. Wolfman, a lupine bully with gender issues. Mr. Wolfman has a female alter-ego, Lambskin, who has her own issues: a histrionic flirt, she has a tendency to fall into abusive relationships. Boxer's "psycho-bestiary" is rounded out by Ratma'am, an obsessive-compulsive rodent who loves to gather garbage (a pack-rat, in fact). These animals are wonderfully articulate but Dr. Floyd is quick to turn their simplest complaints into glib generalizations about separation anxiety, masochistic wishes, and compulsive washing. Thus when Mr. Bunnyman fears he is being followed, Dr. Floyd warns him about "paranoia among bunnies." Unfortunately, Dr. Floyd's quick deployment of categories overlooks the genuine basis of his patient's fears, thus illustrating the common complaint that psychoanalysts downplay "historic reality" (what actually happened) and overemphasize "psychic reality" (how the patient thinks). With the lightest of touches, Boxer raises the criticism of Freud's hostility to "historic reality" which was made earlier in Janet Malcolm's heavy-handed In the Freud Archives. Aside from overplaying "psychic reality", Freud has received much flack, some of it powerfully damaging, from feminists, who note that the psychoanalyst tended to give medical sanctions to traditional patriarchal ideas. Again, when dealing with the contentious issue of Freud's woman problem, Boxer uses deft wit to dramatize the debate. In perhaps the most shocking section of the book, Dr. Floyd submerged infatuation with Lambskin leads him to bully her into a "fleecing" remedy designed to make her more compliant. (Fleece being a play on the infamous Dr.Wilhelm Fliess, who encouraged Freud to use all sorts of quack therapies). Despite the fact that the In the Floyd Archives is based on current debates about psychoanalysis, it would be a mistake to see Boxer simply as a combatant in the Freud Wars. She is just a steeped in cartooning tradition as she is in analytical lore. Unlike most contemporary cartoonists who do long extended narratives, Boxer's roots are not in superhero fantasies or underground self-_expression. Rather, Boxer belongs to the line of erudite, intellectual cartooning exemplified by Jules Feiffer, David Levine and Edmund Gorey. Like these great bookish cartoonists, Boxer takes ideas as seriously as a professor does, yet retains the artist's desire for story and visual play. As an artist, Boxer's great strengths are her inventive sense of design and her ability to imbue simple line-drawn characters with distinct personalities. Boxer's design sense is evident especially in the page layout: although almost all the scenes involve Dr. Floyd talking with a patient in his office, there is a constant, unobtrusive variety in the page layouts. Rather like the early Sunday pages of Krazy Kat, boxes and circles play off each other, as the shifting borders of the panels mimic the fluid emotions of the characters. Although Dr. Floyd and his patients are usually nothing more than a dozen flat lines on the page, they have an enormous repertoire of emotions. At his best, Dr. Floyd is sincerely helpful, but he can also be overbearingly manipulative. Mr. Bunnyman starts as a nervous wreck but he has his twitchy pride. When pushed too far, Bunnyman becomes quietly belligerent. By contrast, Wolfman's outward bravado turns out to be a mask for insecurity. Wolfman's female half, Lambskin clearly loves being at the center of male attention, even as resents being co-opted into other people's fantasies. Ratma'am is more forceful in dealing with men, but her real problem is things: like many compulsive collectors, her desire to accumulate takes over her life. In interviews, Boxer uses the analogy of the Rorschach test to explain why very simple, albeit elegant, animals can evoke such a complex emotional response. "One of the really rewarding things about having written this is having people come up to me and say, 'I love Bunnyman, this is how I feel.' 'I love Ratma'am. She's such a smart mouse. That is how I talk to my analyst.'" Boxer notes. "So it is sort of a Rorschach for people. Some people find it funny but some people find it really disturbing." Funny and disturbing at the same time, In the Floyd Archives calls to mind such minor classics as Feiffer's Tantrum and Chester Brown's I Never Liked You. Like these books, it is a quick read which grows deeper every time we return to it. Dr. Floyd's analysis may be ineffective, but Boxer's own character study cuts deep.