Editing Logotherapy (section)

===Discovering meaning===
According to Frankl, "We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering" and that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances".<ref name="Frankl2006" /> On the meaning of suffering, Frankl gives the following example:

{{blockquote|"Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now how could I help him? What should I tell him? I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with a question, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive without you?:" "Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" Whereupon I replied, "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office.<ref name="Frankl2006" />{{rp|178–179}}}}

Frankl emphasized that realizing the value of suffering is meaningful only when the first two creative possibilities are not available (for example, in a concentration camp) and only when such suffering is inevitable{{spaced ndash}}he was not proposing that people suffer unnecessarily.<ref name="Frankl1986">{{Cite book |last=Frankl, Viktor |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=v_qiURM2r2MC |title=The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy |date=12 October 1986 |publisher=Random House Digital, Inc. |isbn=978-0-394-74317-2 |access-date=17 May 2012}}</ref>{{rp|115}}