In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

WIRELESS COMMUNICATION 247
Toledo on October 20 (Lorenzo, 114-115). French broadcasters specialize
in live shows "from the streets of Paris," and cover part of the
popular Tour de France (Anmies-memoire, 156ff.). [see Endurance] No
other impresario uses the new medium more successfully than Tex
Rickard, Jack Dempsey's promoter. An estimated fifteen million radio
listeners all across the United States, Latin America, and Europe follow
the title fight between Dempsey and Gene Tunney on the evening of
September 23, while heavy rainfall seriously impairs the quality of the
journalistic accounts transmitted by telegraph. Not without
astonishment, the New York Times reports one day later that, although
this fight has drawn the largest number of spectators in the history of
boxing, "the crowd that hung outside the stadium [was] probably the
smallest" ever. The technologically produced immediacy of the live radio
broadcast has become largely accepted as a substitute for physical presence
at or near the place of action: "But the radio was the biggest
counter-attraction. As soon as the unfortunates without tickets or the
means to buy them realized that gate-crashing was out of the question
and that they would hardly be near enough to hear the shouts of those
within the stadium, many of them returned to their homes or paid their
way into the exposition grounds to hear the fight returns by radio."
As the "radio revolution" visibly changes many everyday habits, it
ends up generating concerns about possible effects on human perception
and emotions (Chronik, 20). Amid the general enthusiasm over wireless
communication, a debate is reviving about the possibility of transferring
thoughts from one mind to another without any external signs or manifestations.
This discussion provokes a reaction by Sigmund Freud regarding
the relationship between telepathy and psychoanalysis. Of course,
Freud cannot fully subscribe to what others have presented (and claim
to master) as the techniques of telepathy, because this would weaken the
reputation of psychoanalysis as the most powerful method of detecting
and manipulating hidden mechanisms in the human mind. On the other
hand, psychoanalysis would fail to live up to its growing stature if its
inventor had no rejoinder at all to the challenge offered by telepathy.
Predictably, Freud adopts an attitude of skeptical affirmation: "Even if
the reports of telepathic occurrences (inaccurately called thought-transference)
are submitted to the same critique with which we have fended
off other occult assertions, there remains a considerable amount of material
that one cannot so easily neglect. Some observations and experi-