Abstract
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 (2001, reissued in 2019) and Mother May I? A Post-Floydian Folly (2019). 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 outside the clinic. Mr. Bunnyman first appears begging for help because he is being pursued by a wolf, which within the first two sessions Dr. Floyd diagnoses as a paranoid persecution fantasy and anger over mother issues. His mother, Mr. Bunnyman tells Dr. Floyd, did not abandon him; she was eaten by a wolf. Though not an implausible claim for a bunny, Dr. Floyd suggests, “I want you to stare down that ‘wolf’ and find your real fear” (p. 11). Mr. Bunnyman quickly embraces Floyd’s interpretations, finding in Floyd a substitute mother through becoming a devoted patient.
Questions are raised for the reader about Dr. Floyd’s fast interpretation and Mr. Bunnyman’s fast submission when, upon exiting Dr. Floyd’s office after the first session, Mr. Bunnyman encounters Mr. Wolfman at the door, waiting to enter as Dr. Floyd’s next patient. Here begins the parade of some of Freud’s most famous cases embodied in Dr. Floyd’s patients: the Wolfman, the Ratman, and Lambskin, who brings first Dora and then Irma’s botched nose surgery into the treatment room.
There is little doubt that Boxer shares some of the indignation that many feel about Freud’s dismissal of Dora’s response to Herr K.’s sexual aggression as hysteria or as denied sexual desire. Indeed, throughout In the Floyd Archives, Dr. Floyd’s insistence on turning his patients’ material into the Freudian canon can appear ridiculous, unless of course we choose to believe that all of their expressions are persecutory fantasies devoid of reality. Boxer’s ambivalence about Freud’s treatment of his patients is not unlike that found in Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives (1984), which tells the story of Jeffrey Masson’s love, hatred, betrayal, and revenge when he became director of the Freud Archives. Boxer makes it clear in her introduction to In the Floyd Archives that she grew up with her father’s love of Freud and considers Freud family (p. ix). Boxer tells us that she does not hate Freud, but also does not worship him, and that, besides, such ideas are irrelevant (pp. xi–xii). In fact, Boxer’s deeply conflictual feelings about Freud may do more honor to the complexities of his work and life than the jealous, worshipful guarding of his work seen in Malcolm’s telling or in an analytic insistence, sometimes seen, on reading every case as a confirmation of Freud’s theories.
Without giving too much away, to make the transition to Mother May I? it is necessary to reveal that at the conclusion of In the Floyd Archives, Dr. Floyd has terminated analysis with his four patients and flown away. Mother May I? finds Mr. Bunnyman, Mr. Wolfman, Lambskin, and Rat Ma’am stranded together in the wilderness, struggling to determine how to live, as Boxer says, “in the post-Floydian landscape, half treated, half mad” (p. ix). Drawing from Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and Moses and Monotheism (1939), we find our characters arguing over whether to kill Dr. Floyd by burning an effigy or to deify him by creating a totem. After Mr. Bunnyman’s devotion, Mr. Wolfman’s ambivalence, and Lambskin’s passivity win the argument against Rat Ma’am’s insistence that they need to destroy Dr. Floyd to be free of him, they enter into games—Mother May I? and tag, which Boxer tells us in an endnote takes after a chasing and catching game called “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” Through their games, they attempt to establish the rules that will order them in Dr. Floyd’s absence, but to Rat Ma’am’s taste, Mother May I? gives too much power to the mother and tag too much to the losers.
Enter the new icons of psychoanalysis—Melanin Klein, Melittle Klein, Eric Klein or Little Hans, and the Squiggle Piggle, who cannot be mistaken for anyone other than Donald Winnicott. Melanin appears as the narcissistic, seductive black sheep who promises to take Dr. Floyd’s place and guide our main characters through their envy, loss, and rage. Eric embodies pleasure in destruction and creation and promises Mr. Bunnyman closure in the form of omnipotence, if he will only kill his Dr. Floyd/Mommy, Melanin/Moses god. From Melittle, we see Melanin through the eyes of contempt and unfettered hatred. “You’re only right,” Melittle retorts to Melanin’s interpretation of jealousy, “if I hate parts of you. But Mummy, I hate all of you” (p. 93).
There is nothing likeable about Melanin Klein. Even her name, which I associate to a long history of race and racism, leaves me uneasy. I am somewhat less confused by allusions to race when Eric Klein, in calling Mr. Bunnyman to destruction, begins calling him “Brer Bunny,” the trickster rabbit who drew on his quick wits to counter the destructive forces of American slavery. As we might expect from books whose subjects are love, hate, need, and dependence in psychoanalysis, both books have many unsettling allusions to sexual aggression, willful self-interest, and, as I am suggesting here, an unresolved connection to racism both in the book and in the history of psychoanalysis. Such questions cannot be ignored.
Mother May I? also suggests that its characters are being used as part-objects. Poor Squiggle Piggle is used only insofar as his tail can be yanked to create speech bubbles for ongoing squiggle games. His response to this constant tail abuse is to declare that he needs to find an escape from the Kleinian madness. Nevertheless, somehow, as the book progresses, our characters continually come together and move apart in ways that show them stumbling toward something. As Freud did in the Wolf Man case, Boxer denies us the satisfaction of believing the characters reach resolution or a cure. In the end, we see Mr. Bunnyman leaving the other characters behind and setting out on his own, only to climb his monument to Mother and ask her totem, “Mother May I?” (p. 150).
Boxer tells us that all of the characters in Mother May I?, “though real to themselves, may not be so much encountering as imagining them.” This reality is her invitation, she tells us, to “Let the games begin!” (p. viii). Indeed, imagining these books as a kind of Olympian undertaking, great contests of struggle, might, and sacrifice that are, in the end, only games, may be a helpful disposition for readers to take. Boxer has an incredible command of Freud’s writings, and the illustrations, puns, jokes, and speech of the characters are filled with allusions, some obvious and some obscure, to Freud’s work. It can make for a difficult read, even for readers well versed in Freud’s work. Boxer attempts to help the reader along by providing no fewer than sixty-one substantial endnotes for the first book and ninety-eight for the second to explain her references to Freud’s cases. Although the comic form might make us wish for lighter reading, the text seems to provide two rather different options—to read the books several times, studying them with their endnotes like academic treatises, or to treat them, as Boxer suggests, like dreams or free associations, to flow with the texts and accept what they give rise to. I tried both and came to prefer the latter.
Regardless of one’s approach to the books, In the Floyd Archives and Mother May I?, much like psychoanalysis itself, raise questions, evoke intensities of feeling, make us uncomfortable, and leave us wanting both more and less. In the best tradition of psychoanalysis, Boxer’s books make it clear that these things are ours to contend with.