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The Chairs (10), subtitled A Tragic Farce, written in French1 in 1951 by Eugene Ionesco, is considered a major work of the theatrical “convention” known as the Theater of the Absurd (3). It owes this distinction to the originality and craftsmanship with which Ionesco dramatizes ideas made familiar by existentialist writers. The literary definition of the Theater of the Absurd which follows suggests that the plays in this group differ so radically from conventional drama in subject matter and form because they are a version of the writer's psychic reality which has been projected to stand for mankind's reality.
“While former attempts at confronting man with the ultimate realities of his condition projected a coherent and generally recognized version of the truth, the Theatre of the Absurd merely communicates one poet's most intimate and personal intuition of the human situation, his own sense of being, his individual vision of the world. This is the subject matter of the Theatre of the Absurd, and it determines its form, which must, of necessity, represent a convention of the stage basically different from the ‘realistic’ theatre of our time” (3, p. 293).
The psychic reality which this play of the Absurd materializes as the human situation is the subject of this study.
The Chairs is intriguing for psychoanalytic investigation because, at first glance, it appears to be a play of chaotic nonsense. The often hilarious dialogue of the only two characters who speak is meaningless if judged according to conventional standards, or it is merely cliché-ridden, banal, and stereotyped. The behavior and affective states of the characters appear to be as