Description: As cartoonist Boxer writes in the introduction to this charming animal story, her first character, Mr. Bunnyman, "came to Dr. Floyd with a common bunny concern: he was being chased by a wolf". Dr. Floyd, a bespectacled, pipe-smoking bird, assumed that Bunnyman's problem was psychological -- that, like so many bunnies, he'd been abandoned by his mother, and was having paranoid fantasies. But in walks Floyd's next patient, Mr. Wolfman, who is no fantasy, and whose resemblance to Freud's Wolf Man will be clear to Freud falls. Floyd soon discovers that the bragging, sexually aggresive Mr. Wolfman is a crossdresser, who likes to indulge his soft side. Thus we meet his alterego, Lambskin, a hysteric on par with the famous Dora, who insisted, Boxer notes, on becoming a character in her own right. Last but not least there's Rat Ma'am, an obsessive-compulsive pack rat, and one of the few non-hysterical females in the history of the Couch.

The adventures of these analysands, whose lives outside Floyd's office intertwine in increasingly amusing ways as he attempts to treat them, provide a wonderful tour of the Freudian world, complete with detailed endnotes about the classic case histories that they pay homage to. But more than that, they provide further evidence of Freud's comic genius, and of the way that the funniest things about people, even as we laugh at them, touch upon deep anxieties and fears that we all share. Both a thoughtful commentary on and a humorous send-up of the examined life, this book will delight general readers, cartoon aficionados, animal lovers, and Freudian experts alike.

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