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The dramatic works of Eugene Ionesco, as well as his other writings, provide striking corroboration of Freud's (1917) view that excessive grief or melancholia is associated with a grievance against the loved person, as described in his classic paper Mourning and Melancholia. Freud's analysis strongly implies a narcissistic type of object-choice. There is the additional implication that the lost object has been experienced in an ambivalent way. Consequent abandonment of the lost object and a regressive move toward narcissistic identification results in anger being turned against the self. The result is depression and thoughts of death, partly as a form of self-punishment and partly as a means of revenge against the erstwhile love-object. I will try to illustrate the operation of these mechanisms in the structure of Ionesco's plays and trace their source in his relationship with his parents, particularly the father.
Ionesco's drama is a theater of the absurd in its method, but its underlying seriousness of purpose should not be ignored. To read Ionesco's memoirs Present Past Past Present (1971) or Fragments of a Journal is to recognize in Ionesco's plays the dramatic expression of profound psychological realities grounded in anguish, despair, and bitterness.
In The Bald Soprano Ionesco's characters act out their destructive and anarchic impulses using words like weapons to confound each other. The dialogue consists of dissociated fragments