An Overview to Black Mirror Season 4, Episode 2 "Arkangel" From a Developmental Psychopathological Perspective

The particular episode of the Black Mirror series is an important one to be discussed since we are in these years when we are intertwined with technology the most. Sara, the main character of the episode 2 of Black Mirror series season 4, is a child who may we call an atypical child. Atypical child is generally considered as the child whose behaviors are deviated from the normal developmental pattern. A technological device named “Arkangel” mainly caused this deviation. Arkangel was developed in the United States with the purposes of allowing parents literally spy on their children. A chip inserted into children’s brains made parents to see whatever the child sees and gave them even the opportunity to interfere with the vision of the child is through an iPad that the chip was connected to. By using this iPad, you could simply block everything makes the child’s heartbeat increased such as barking of a dog or prevent child to see even any blood, sex or violence incident. This kind of severe protection may cause child to behave in an aggressive and harmful manner, as Sara did. She had harmed her own mother at the end of the episode mainly because of this device’s effects on her state of psychological well-being.

At first, the whole idea seems useful in terms of reducing parents’ anxiety and protecting the infant. However, it most probably causes children to suffer from some sorts of psychological problems later on such as being anti-social, dependent, irritable, anxious and depressive. When you look deeper into the issue, it also makes parents more obsessed and anxious. Being able to interfere with even every little aspect of child’s life makes parents to think if anything bad happens to her/him, “This is completely my fault because I literally could have inhibited it”. It is obviously displayed in the show with the mother of Sara: Marie. Marie is an obsessed and anxious mom. When Sara was growing as a normal (development according to norms) toddler, someday she was disappeared at playground and Marie went crazy- what if she lost her. Then, she decided to use the Arkangel. However, protecting a child from all of the possible danger out in the world is not a good idea as much as it seems, because a child needs to grow both emotionally and socially while being exposed to some degree of stressors so s/he needs to learn how to deal with the stress. Some examples for stressors for a child might be getting lost, frightening from a dog, seeing blood or a experiencing a significant person having heart attack etc. Searching for ways to deal with it makes him/her develop defense mechanisms and create a healthy and reciprocal relationship with his/her primary caregiver and healthy future relationships.

Arkangel made Sara vulnerable and dependent in time. She was growing up without seeing any violent scene, which normally, we all can possibly exposed to in our daily lives such as a bleeding incident. That leads to the conclusion of Sara not knowing how to protect herself from any kind of danger or stressor. When she was going to school, she could not understand what her friends doing at the times that they were in a fight because she did not know what a fight looks like or even what it means. Overprotecting the child eventually caused to peer rejection. She was alienated from others at her school and suffered from loneliness. At some point, Marie decided to leave the device but it was not easy for both of them since Marie became addicted to this device and Sara was afraid of the outer world. Overprotecting a child possibly could be a risk factor.

Piaget was a cognitive developmental psychologist and he was arguing that children create schemas while they are interacting with the world and those schemas make them ready to learn new things and basically, to life. His theory was a stage-based theory and those stages are sensorimotor (0-2), preoperational (2-6), concrete operational (7-12) and formal operational (12-adult). According to him, children are egocentric at the preoperational stage, which is the years that Sara had the chip inside her brain and started to school. As she was egocentric by nature of the period, she could not get the point of her mother why she was doing that to her. In my opinion, not knowing the reason but experiencing the suffer that Arkangel caused made the problem even bigger. She also had a problem with the issue of appearance-reality. She could not understand which is real blood and which is not. This was because she was not able to see any blood in her life until the mother gave the device up. According to Piaget’s theory, there are personal fables created to resurgence in teenage years within the three common themes- invulnerability, omnipotence and personal uniqueness. They are necessary to be developed. Otherwise, youth become open to any kind of risk factors such the ones happened to Sara. As in cognitive theorists’ sayings, we have observed problematic behavior patterns in the whole episode due to faulty cognitions.
 
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Dilara Nihal ÇARIKÇI