In Chapter 4 of Understanding Media, McLuhan titles this one The Gadget Lover with the subtitle of "Narcissus as Narcosis". In this subtitle he is recognizing, in a Joycean sense, that Narcissus comes from the word narcosis, which means to be "numb". When one is considered Narcissistic, one does not recognize their own image and are blind from the mirror (or insight) from which external reality provides. The numbness McLuhan expresses is that one does not experience themselves in their environment and are cut off, or amputated from themselves as they no longer recognize themselves in their mirror.
This is the dilemma of the Gadget Lover. It is not that one is in love with themselves, but rather one is totally involved with the other self they perceive to be separate that they lose their own being at the cost of it. "Obviously [Narcissus] would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself."
The quality in which we participate with technology is akin to the myth of Narcissus in that we use the media as something we define as separate from our own image and therefore do not recognize ourselves in the technology. As McLuhan so well points out, "Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Seyle and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as "autoamputation," ad they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions that indicate this self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of "wanting to jump out of my skin" or of "going out of my mind," being "driven batty" or "flipping my lid." And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play."
In essence, the technology that is created are a type of reaction to a pain of the body, or dis-ease or discomfort within. Unless the area is located as the problem, our nervous system will protect itself from pain by producing a counter or balance of that pain in a a form that is a representation of that offending pain, accordingly to where that pain derives from in the body. Many times we are unable to locate the discomfort and thereby the technology thats created from this is unseen as anything in our image, and thereby we remain numb to the problem. McLuhan refers to these areas of discomfort as "irritation" and technology as "counter-irritation". What the counter irritant provides is an "immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system".
Because the CNS plays a chief role in our senses, he states, "whatever threatens its function must be contains, localized, or even cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ." Is McLuhan describing the onset of physical diseases? That, when the CNS continually protects itself by CNS to a technology as a counter-irritant that it will let the offending organ die off before it allows pain into its environment? Is the CSN naturally disposed towards pleasure? According to McLuhan, pleasure is equally a counter-irritant. This harkens back to the first chapter in the discussion of General David Sarnoff's quote of whether media is good or bad. Here, the CNS does not seek pleasure or pain, but protects from both. And when both are not sufficiently sustained to any degree, out comes the counter-irritant in a protective effort to maintain the equilibrium.
Returning back to the myth of Narcissus, when a technology is demanded as a counter-irritant, then one must accept and conform to these technologies in order to use them. It is then the reflection is beheld, mistakably as something separate, and going unnoticed as such in
