Screwtape offers more advice on using daily annoyances to entrap a Patient

[soso]

Screwtape offers more advice on using daily annoyances to entrap a Patient:

It is, no doubt, impossible [to prevent his praying for his mother],

but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. 

Make sure [that they are always very ‘spiritual’],

that he is always concerned /with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. 

Two advantages will follow. 

In the first place, his attention will be kept /on what he regards /as her sins,

by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced /to mean any of her actions //which are inconvenient

or irritating to himself. 

Thus you can keep [rubbing the wounds of the day] [a little sorer] /even while he is on his knees;

 the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. 

In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, 

he will, in some degree, be praying /for an imaginary person,

and it will be your task to make [that imaginary person] [daily less and less like the real mother]

—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table.

 In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that [no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother] will ever flow over /into his treatment of the real one.

 I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer f

or a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis