Robert Downer is one of the most popular American Actor whose career began as early as the age of four. Robert Downey Junior was born in April 1965 in New York. His father, Robert Downey Senior, was a renowned filmmaker in the days and is mostly known for the 1969 film, ‘Putney Swope'. Downey's mother, Elsie, was an actor and instilled in her son the passion of acting. Downer had an elder sister with whom they were raised in Greenwich Village. Downey soon featured in one of his father’s films in 1970, known as the ‘pound’ in which he played puppy. Downey also lived a disturbed life as a child as his parents later divorced while he was only thirteen years old. He later dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen. He lived in two different places as a teenager as his mother lived in New York his father stayed in Los Angeles.
Downey's father was a drug addict who allowed Downey to use drugs such as marijuana as early as the age of six. As he grew up, drugs formed a special part of his life which also caused a lot of problems to his personal and career life. Downey starred in many movies and TV series in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s. He was a total addict by the time he reached his 20s which significantly affected his acting career. Some of his great movies include Chaplin, Iron Man and The Avengers (Parish, 2011). In the 2000s, Downey faced many charges of drug use and abuse and charges of disorderly conducts. At some instances in his life, he faced jail terms which put him away from his family (Pomerantz, 2013). He had married back in the year 1992 and later remarried again in the year 2005. Downey struggled with drugs throughout his early life and career. Despite his drug challenges, today he remains among the top on the list of best Hollywood actors.
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Psychodynamic Theory
Psychodynamic theories consist of many theories by different psychologists which agree on certain aspects of human personality (Ewen, 2014). All psychodynamic theories emphasize on aspects such as unconscious motives and desires and also maintain that childhood experiences shape the personality of a person. Sigmund Freud is one of the well-known psychodynamic theorists. According to Freud, humans have three levels of awareness which include the conscious, the unconscious and the preconscious. The information that an individual is paying attention to at any given time is contained in the Conscious. These may include the object a person is viewing, the sound that he can hear, pain or hunger which he feels. The preconscious, on the other hand, contains the information which is outside the attention of a person but which are readily available if needed. For instance, the phone number of a close friend or relative will always stay at the back of a person's mind. The unconscious component contains thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires which a person is not aware of but greatly influences almost every aspect of his life.
Freud also maintained that a person's personality is composed of three components namely the id which contains biological urges, the ego which regulates constraints between the real world and a person's id and the superego composed of moral standards of the society. Freud also believed that these three components of personality are in constant conflict. Such conflicts may cause effects such as anxiety (Colarusso & Nemiroff, 2013). The ego is supposed to balance the demands of the id and the superego and when a balance cannot be achieved a state of conflict arises in the form of anxiety. For people to manage these internal conflicts, defense mechanisms such as repression, projection, regression and denial among others. For instance, a person may decide to forget a troubling moment or memory in order not to feel bad about it.
The psychological theory maintains that childhood experiences, especially the experiences before the age of five, are responsible for shaping their personality. A child may not be able to develop from a stage to another if his or her needs are frustrated at that stage. Such children may focus on the needs which were over-frustrated when they grow up. Adler, another psychodynamic theorist, developed his line of thought which maintained that the striving for superiority is the primary motivation of human behavior (DeRobertis, 2011). According to Adler, children are driven by the sense of feeling inferior to adults and the urge to adapt and develop skills as a way of compensation. Children who suffer from exaggerated sense of inferiority due to neglect of being spoiled tend to overcompensate by acquiring more things which gives them more superiority.
The psychodynamic theory appears quite relevant in explaining the development, challenges and the success of Robert Downey Junior. He lived with parents who loved to perform and make films. His father was a drug addict and shared marijuana with him at a tender age. His mother instilled the passion of acting in him at a tender age. He made his debut while playing puppy in one of his father's films. The childhood experiences shaped his lifestyle and career, and today he still has a lot of passion for filmmaking and acting. As Adler's theory suggests, his inferior state as a young kid made him explore more and do more than his father ever did regarding acting and filmmaking. On another perspective, the environment around his childhood life also affected his life and career as he has struggled a lot with drugs.
References
Colarusso, C. A., & Nemiroff, R. A. (2013). Adult development: A new dimension in psychodynamic theory and practice . Springer Science & Business Media.
DeRobertis, E. M. (2011). Deriving a third force approach to child development from the works of Alfred Adler. Journal of Humanistic Psychology , 51 (4), 492-515.
Ewen, R. (2014). An introduction to theories of personality . Psychology Press.
Parish, J. R. (2011). The Hollywood Book of Extravagance: The Totally Infamous, Mostly Disastrous, and Always Compelling Excesses of America's Film and TV Idols . John Wiley & Sons.
Pomerantz, D. (2013). Robert Downey Jr. Tops Forbes. List of Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actors’, Forbes , 16 .
