MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man's relations with his
mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the
centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient's conduct under
the new standard, and may reach his behaviour toward the old lady at any moment. You
want to get in first. Keep in close touch with our colleague Glubose who is in
charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settled
habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks. The following methods are useful.
1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside
him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of
his own mind—or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you
should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary
duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that
most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You
must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an
hour without discovering any of those facts about himself ,which are perfectly
clear to anyone who has over lived in the same house with him or worked the same
office.
2. 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 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.
3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that
each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably
irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of
your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to
dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him
assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy — if you know your
job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of
course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy
her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.
4. In civilised life, domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things
which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in
such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the
face. To keep this game up, you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two
fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own
utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual
words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the
fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and
the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence
from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced,
that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: "I simply ask her what
time dinner will be and she flies into a temper." Once this habit is well
established, you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the
express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.
Finally, tell me something about the old lady's religious position. Is she at
all jealous of the new factor in her son's life? — at all piqued that he should
have learned from others, and so late, what she considers she gave him such good
opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she feel he is making a great deal of
"fuss" about it — or that he's getting in on very easy terms? Remember the elder
brother in the Enemy's story,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter THREE
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