“Über dies eigene Ich wieder hinaus”: Stefan Zweig and Adlerian Psychology

Abstract

This article examines the biographical and literary connections between Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and psychologist Alfred Adler. While Zweig's reception of Freudian psychoanalysis has been widely documented by scholarship, the impact of Adler's Individual Psychology on Zweig's works has so far received little attention. The article will first establish the nature and extent of their personal relationship and Zweig's engagement with and reception of Individual Psychology. It will then draw on Zweig's posthumously published novella War er es? (1942) and provide an Adlerian reading of the text. It will be argued that Zweig's focus on Adler in his exile works owes much to his concept of Finalität, which Zweig adopts as a fundamental future-oriented outlook in much of his later fiction and nonfiction.