John
Vassos (1898-1985) was an American immigrant famous as a designer at the height
of the Art Deco movement. He worked extensively with the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA) designing radio units before moving on to such things as
televisions and computers. He was born in Romania to Greek parents and grew up
in Istanbul. He became notorious as a newspaper cartoonist before joining the
Royal Navy to fight for Britain in World War One. Afterwards, he moved to
Boston in 1919 to study art, then went to New York in 1924 to start work as a
designer, creating murals, architecture and advertising. He began working for
the RCA and spent the next forty years as their lead consulting designer.
Along
the way he produced several illustrated books, incorporating his pure line
aesthetic to augment various texts. These include Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” amongst
others. The most unique item in his oeuvre,
however, must be Phobia, a collection
of 23 Art Deco images illustrating various well-documented fears. Fascinated by
the burgeoning insights provided by psychology, Vassos embarked upon this
personal production with zeal and the results are stunning. First published in
1931, the book is quite scarce nowadays and generally expensive if encountered.
That being said, the good people at Dover Publications Inc. have seen fit to
produce reprints, one in 1976 and another in 2009, in order to keep the work
alive in peoples’ minds.
In
the spirit of this proliferation, and keeping in mind the tradition of phobia
lists throughout editions of the “Call of
Cthulhu” roleplaying game, I offer the art of John Vassos as inspiration
for all players out there. In this post are Vassos’s Preface along with the book’s original frontispiece; later posts
will highlight a single illustrated phobia with its written description. Enjoy!
Preface
“I
must begin by apologising. I am not a psychiatrist, and my apparent presumption
in publishing this venture into the unreal world of phobia necessitates some
explanation. However, I can only plead in extenuation my keen personal interest
in a subject whose fascination has claimed my attention for many years. I here
offer the results of that interest, in a series of drawings in which I attempt
to portray some of the fears by which mankind is harassed. The phobias I have
selected for illustration are only those which best lend themselves to my
purpose and which have interested me strongly. Nor does the text pretend to any
great authority. This is not a treatise on psychopathology. I have written the
text merely as an aid to the understanding of the drawings and as a suggestion
of some of the underlying factors by whose agency a phobia may be produced.
“A
phobia is essentially graphic. The victim creates in his mind a realistic
picture of what he fears, a mental image of a physical thing. The sufferer from
acrophobia, for example, sees his body hurtling through space, the
aichmophobiac projects an image of himself in the act of stabbing; in this
mental picture the thing that he fears becomes actual, for all that its
projection is purely imaginative. It is this mental picture that I have
endeavoured to set down – the imaginal, graphic annihilation that the phobiac
experiences each time his fear is awakened. The illustrations should be
considered first as a whole and then in their component parts, to arrive at the
complete meaning. They are intended to be inclusive – that is, to depict both worlds
of the phobiac’s existence: the physical and the imaginary, the actual and the
projected. The real world is replaced by the unreal as the pictorial pattern of
the sufferer’s destiny parades ceaselessly through his mind.
“Usually,
the layman makes no distinction between normal fear, complex, mania, and
phobia. It must be remembered that in the last, while the fear of an actual
thing is the symbol, the fear itself is psychotic and so abnormally exaggerated
that it stops just this side of madness. The phobias here presented are
arranged more or less in the order of their intensity, progressing from the
comparatively mild nichtophobia, or fear of the dark, to the awful hypnophobia,
the fear of sleep, removed from true insanity by a margin so slight as to be hardly
discernible.
“The
text attempts to convey something of the mood of each picture as well as to
afford an explanation (necessarily scant and incomplete) of the meanings of the
various phobias. It must be borne in mind that no unanimity of opinion on this
subject has yet been achieved by the psychopathologists, and I have tempered
the extent of my temerity by adhering to a middle ground which, if not
comprehensive, at least lies within the bounds of probability. Phobias do not
lend themselves to solution or analysis with the same readiness of algebraic
problems, although psychiatrists who pretend to omniscience are unfortunately
not lacking. We are dealing here with the imaginings of diseased minds, and
many of their manifestations are irreducible to law. Certain characteristics,
however, seem to have been fairly well established by one or another of the various
schools of modern psychology – enough, at any rate, to enable us to grasp the
beginnings of comprehension.
“At
the bottom of all phobias there seem to be a few fundamental desires: the
desire for sex-gratification, the desire for suicide, and the will-to-power.
The inhibitory restraints – whether social, religious, or moral – which prevent
the satisfaction of these desires, set up a fear in the individual of some real
object or condition that becomes the symbol of his maladjustment. There can be
little doubt that our heritage of the Puritanic concept of sex as sin has much
to do with the origin of many of our phobias today. As primitive man trembled
before the shafts of lightning – which aeons later were to become the bolts of
Jove – so now we tremble before an inherited moral code by whose tenets the generative
act is robbed of both meaning and pleasure. A grim retribution attends us, a punishment
for the enjoyment of what we still unconsciously regard as sin. We have rid
ourselves, to a large extent, of superstition and witchcraft, but we still do
private homage to irrational terrors where once there was ritual awe of the
supernatural. The Christian peoples, whose Saviour was born of a virgin, that
is, without ‘sin’, have for centuries maintained an unnatural ideal of chastity
and have at length fallen victims to the demands of their thwarted natural
desires. The desire for suicide is present in nearly all phobias because the
phobiac generally feels an imperative need for release from his disordered
life. Yet because he fears death he also fears those conditions that are favourable
to its consummation. So also the exigencies of our modern social structure,
with its tremendous premium on worldly success, have taken their toll of
sufferers – the weaker-spirited among us who cannot achieve the positions to
which they aspire or else fear to make the effort that will segregate them from
the comforting obscurity of the crowd. Any of these fundamental impulses,
acting independently or together, may serve to produce one or more of the
various phobias.
“We
know everything but how to live, and our success at everything else leaves us a
prey to monstrosities born within us. Our unsatisfied desires, at variance with
our archaic concepts of life, come to us wonderful in terror and temptation. A
man who has a phobia fears a figment of fancy. He desires what he doesn’t want
to desire, and he fears the symbol of his desire even as he clasps it to his
breast. He cannot take what he wants nor can he cease to want it. Such is the
law of diseased symbolism which is phobia.
“For
the preparation of the text I am greatly indebted to friends among the
psychopathologists who generously helped me to correlate my ideas and to check
my conclusions; and to my wife, Ruth Vassos, for her invaluable assistance in
the actual writing. How my scientific friends may ultimately assess the value
of my encroachment of their preserves I do not know. I do know that they agree
with me that genius seldom springs from so-called normal minds, but frequently
from those whose tremendous imaginative power leads them along strange by-ways.”
John Vassos
New York City
May 25th, 1931.
