In Part 2, Frankl articulates his approach to psychotherapeutic methods, which center on Finding Meaning in Extreme Conditions. He encourages therapists to probe their patients to find out what gives their lives meaning, whether love, a sense of unfulfilled destiny, or a sense of strength and nobility despite difficulties and suffering. Once the doctor has determined where and how the patient finds meaning, they can advise the patient on how to focus their energy and resources on what is most meaningful. Frankl believes this approach will cure most cases of maladaptive behavior. 

Frankl is also very clear about the types of psychotherapy he opposes. In particular, Frankl disagrees with the Freudian psychotherapeutic approach that focuses on releasing repressed emotions and aims for a calm, peaceful state of mind. Frankl sees this as too close to apathy: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning to be fulfilled by him […] the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole is represented by the man who has to fulfill it” (47). The metaphor of a magnetic field frames friction, if not outright suffering, as inextricable from meaning: Life is a constant negotiation between the person living it and whatever meanings they attach to it. This supports Frankl’s overall point that it one can find purpose amid significant hardship.

Frankl’s dissatisfaction with Freudian psychology also reflects his emphasis on The Importance of Moral Choice—an idea so central to Man’s Search for Meaning that it closes this section and thus the book as originally published. Freudian psychology explains most human behavior as the product of unconscious instinct. Understanding these instincts enables one to modify one’s behavior to some extent, but the theory retains a strongly deterministic bent. For Frankl, this approach fails to capture the centrality of both agency and morality to human existence, which he argues the events of the Holocaust have sharply illuminated: “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them” (58).

Frankl also comes out against the “just-take-a-pill” approach to psychotherapy long before it became common. He argues: 

Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs (46). 

This dovetails with Frankl’s contention about the importance of “tension” in meaning-making. “Existential distress” points to an unfulfilled need, so medicating it away does more harm than good.