---
title: "The counter-irritant spiral: McLuhan, Hans Selye, and relief that deepens the need for relief"
kind: "Article"
topic: "McLuhan & media theory"
date: "2026-10-04"
url: "https://canopticon.com/articles/the-counter-irritant-spiral"
author: "Chris Telford"
license: "CC BY 4.0"
---
A drink takes the edge off a hard day. After a few years of it, the hard days feel harder and the drink does less, so there are more drinks. Addiction science calls this a spiral and has measured it in detail. This article argues that Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, described the same spiral in 1964 — not as a metaphor, but from the same stress physiology the addiction researchers later built on. And it argues that his best-known idea, that a medium becomes an environment we stop seeing, says something precise about addiction: what the person stops seeing is not the drug, but how far their own baseline has moved.

## McLuhan took his theory of media from stress physiology

McLuhan's idea that every medium is an "extension" of the body came with a physiological source, which he named: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium.</q> Selye founded the science of stress. From him McLuhan took the idea that the nervous system protects itself from too much stimulation by going numb: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function.</q> And he said what that numbness does: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">Shock induces a generalized numbness or an increased threshold to all types of perception.</q>

<figure data-kind="pull" doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 1">
“Media ecology has absorbed Selye but stopped at homeostasis. Addiction neuroscience moved from homeostasis to allostasis (Koob & Le Moal 1997, 2001) without ever looking back at McLuhan.”
</figure>

## He described the relief spiral that addiction science later measured

McLuhan called anything that relieves stress by overriding it a counter-irritant, and he named alcohol as one: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant (e.g., sports, entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of irritants.</q> Then he wrote the sentence this article is built on: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.</q>

In 1997 the leading model of addiction described the same shape. George Koob and Michel Le Moal presented addiction as <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 3">a cycle of spiraling dysregulation of brain reward systems that progressively increases, resulting in compulsive drug use and loss of control.</q> The measured core is a raised threshold — McLuhan's word: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 3">All drugs of abuse produce elevations in brain reward thresholds during acute withdrawal</q>, and <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 3">the progressive elevation in reward thresholds was associated with a dramatic escalation in cocaine consumption</q>. McLuhan's two words even mark the turn from early to late addiction. Early on the drug is pleasure, a counter-irritant. Later it is comfort, the removal of an irritant — <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">In late-stage addiction the drug becomes "comfort" by removing an irritant the drug itself produced.</q>

> **Objection: The shared words are a coincidence**
>
> Not quite: the two come from one source. Koob's "allostasis" grew out of the stress research Selye began. <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Summary">McLuhan and Koob are cousins, not ancestor and descendant.</q> But the threshold McLuhan meant and the one Koob measures are not the same thing, and the claim has to stay modest: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 5">McLuhan's "threshold" refers to perception, while Koob's ICSS threshold is an electrophysiological reward measure. The overlap in vocabulary supports structural correspondence, not identity.</q> <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="The Selye lineage">The fair claim is that McLuhan gave a proto-allostatic phenomenology of extension, built on the same Selyean root that allostasis later revised. Saying he "discovered allostasis" would overclaim.</q>

## What the user stops seeing is the baseline, not the drug

McLuhan's famous claim is that a medium becomes the ground — the environment we live inside and no longer notice — while we attend to its content. Applied to addiction, the obvious reading fails: people with an addiction notice the drug constantly. The rebuilt research corrects it: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Summary">In the allostatic model, the thing that becomes the unperceived "ground" is not the drug. It is the drug's opponent process: the anti-reward, stress-surfeit baseline. The drug stays a hyper-salient figure.</q>

In McLuhan's own terms, the drug is the content and the changed state is the medium. He described content as the distraction that keeps the medium unseen — <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Recommendations">the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.</q> The craving holds attention; the shifted baseline it serves goes unnoticed. McLuhan said as much about numbness itself: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 2">Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.</q>

> **Objection: People with an addiction see the drug all too clearly**
>
> That is the objection this version answers rather than dodges. <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Recommendations">This sharpens your thesis and protects it from the obvious objection that addicts perceive the drug all too clearly.</q> The drug is seen; the ground it has moved is not.

## For some people, the drug was there before the self

If use starts young enough, there may be no earlier baseline to compare against. A study of people in a therapeutic community found two routes in: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 4">A distinct identity gain pathway emerged for socially isolated individuals, who described the onset of their addiction in terms of a new valued social identity.</q> <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 4">Participants on the identity loss pathway aimed to renew their pre-addiction identities after treatment while those on the identity gain pathway aimed to build aspirational new identities involving study, work, or family roles.</q> The research puts the second route in McLuhan's terms: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 4">for the constitutive user the drug was never a figure that later became ground. It was the first ground the self was ever figured against.</q>

> **Objection: Most people recover, so addiction is not a trap**
>
> Most do: among people who had ever met dependence criteria, <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 3">"between 76 per cent and 83 per cent were in remission,"</q> mostly without treatment. That fits the bridge rather than breaking it, because it does not claim the spiral is irreversible: <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 3">The figure/ground reading actually fits choice models well: choices made from within an unperceived ground are biased choices.</q> Much of the threshold evidence is also from animals, and the human data are indirect. <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 5">Much of the evidence comes from rodent ICSS and extended-access paradigms. Human data on reward thresholds are indirect.</q>

## What the bridge explains

It explains why relief deepens need: a counter-irritant overrides the irritation without removing it, so the system resets around it and needs more. It explains why people in the spiral describe their state as normal: the medium is the part they cannot see. It explains why stopping is revealing as well as painful — <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Recommendations">Abstinence briefly turns the ground into figure, which predicts a window of improved insight in early abstinence.</q> And it explains why recovery means different things to different people: returning to an earlier self, or building a first one.

Neither field has made this connection. <q doc="the-medium-becomes-the-ground-mcluhan-s-media-theory-and-the-allostati" section="Part 1">Media ecology has absorbed Selye but stopped at homeostasis. Addiction neuroscience moved from homeostasis to allostasis (Koob & Le Moal 1997, 2001) without ever looking back at McLuhan.</q> The person with the drink after the hard day is living inside a medium, and the drink is only what it shows them.