Ray Charles

Ray Charles

Chris Valadez

PSY 200

Pamela Poynter

April 14, 2005

Ray

Ray Charles was the first child of Aretha and Bailey Robinson. He was born in Albany, GA, on September 23, 1930. The time was the height of the Depression in the segregated South, and the Robinsons had started out poor. "You hear folks talking about being poor," Charles recounts. "Even compared to other blacks. . . we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else. Nothing below us except the ground" (Charles, 2005). Ray's mother loved him intensely, and those early years of matenal love fortified him for what was to come.

During the first seven years of his life, Ray transitioned through the first two stages of personality development normally. Stage one is basic trust vs. mistrust, and his mother was devoted to him. She instilled the belief in him that no one on earth was better than anyone else. Ray had no disabilities until he was almost five so the assumption is that he transitioned through the autonomy vs. shame and doubt stage normally. However when he was three years old, he discovered music. A local man in town played the piano, and whenever Ray heard the music, he ran toward the sounds. Ray says that man, Wylie Pitman, was the first person to encourage him musically.

During the third stage, initiative vs. guilt, Ray suffered the tragic loss of his little brother. They had been playing by a huge washtub full of water. His younger brother fell in and slipped under. Ray assumed that his brother was still playing but it finally dawned on him that his brother not moving. Ray tried to pull him out of the water, but by that time his clothes had gotten soaked with water and he was just too heavy for Ray. His brother was dead. Ray's guilt over not being able to save his brother consumed him until he was 15 years old. The death of his brother stunted Ray's emotional development for years.

During stage four of personality development, industry vs. inferiority, Ray could have become overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority about his blindness. Although Ray was completely blind at age seven, he had already accumulated seven years of sight memory, and his mother had conditioned him for the day he would be totally blind. She began to show Ray how to get around and how to find things. Ray felt his mother was very smart even though she only had a fourth grade education. When Ray was seven, his mother sent him to the St. Augustine School for the blind. Attending that school strengthened his belief that his blindness did not make him inferior. It was a dual struggle because he was trying not to feel inferior about his disability while dealing with his first taste of segregation. Segregation for both deaf and blind children was strictly adhered to at the St. Augustine school.

Ray was at the St. Augustine school until he was 15 years old. The developmental stage of a child between the ages of 11 and 18 is called the identity vs. role confusion stage. This is the stage when a child acquires a sense of his or her own identity. Several things happened to Ray during this time that shaped him as a person. He wrote his first musical arrangement: it was the most exciting thing he had ever done. He was 12 years old when he first had that feeling and he never forgot it. Secondly, his mother died when he was 15 years old. According to Ray, it was the most devastating event in his entire life.

Ray described that period as being "completely in another world. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep -- I was totally out of it. There's no way to describe how I actually felt. I was truly a lost child" (Charles, 2005). While Ray was home for the funeral, he could not cry about the death of his mother which made things worse for him. There was an elderly lady in town, Ma Beck, who saw the trauma Ray was experiencing. She talked to Ray and explained to him that his mother brought him up to be independent and strong. Ray finally started to cry. Ma Beck also knew about his brother and how guilty Ray felt about it. Ma Beck made Ray realize that his brother's death was not his fault. The conversation with Ma Beck shook him out of his depression. After that, Ray did what his mother would have expected of him.

Stage six of personality development is the intimacy vs. isolation stage and covers ages 18 through 40. This is where the individual identifies with a partner, or conversely, becomes isolated from meaningful relationships with others. During this phase, Ray fell in love, married, had children, became addicted to heroin (a habit he had for 20 years), and was catapulted to stardom. There was also a dual struggle