"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 for a
wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son
without a qualm."
-- from "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis
