ABSTRACT
"Lebenstir was an attractive phrase coined by the psychologist Alfred Adler who lived and worked in the USA in his years of exile from Hitler's Europe. The term was translated usefully, in the days of the wartime anti-Nazi emigration, as "the style of life" and then "life-style." In Adler's work the term Lebensstil first appeared in 1926, but he adapted it for his own psychological theories from earlier usages, most likely from the sociological writings of his great contemporary, Max Weber. Adler's original phrase, der Lebensstil, was an ambitious concept and indeed a profound theory—after all, he was competing with Freud and Jung-attempting to deal with the complexities of human personality. Fast ocean liners, to the deep regret of transatlantic travellers, no longer cross the ocean in both directions; but linguistic crossovers help to turn the great old barrier between America and Europe into a little lake, even a pond.
