My brother disappeared for many months, finally turning up dead, by an act of suicide. It was only later that we discovered writings that showed how delusional he was. My mother's best friend was undergoing a Jungian analysis at the time and she asked my mother to loan her my brother's writings to show to her analyst. She returned with a message from the analyst I'll never forget: "Tell your friend to understand that her son died of an illness. There is a certain form of schizophrenia that kills. It may kill by suicide or by homicide, but that form of the disease only has one outcome. Your friend's son was killed by his illness."

The analyst also asked my mother's friend to give her a book, "Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual," by E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., considered perhaps the top expert on schizophrenia in the US. Back when my brother died it was a fairly slim book, as not much was known about the disease at the time, although its few pages were packed full of the amazing humanity of its author (who is, yes, a research psychiatrist!). All the members of my family read it. I even felt the need to purchase my own copy, which I kept under my pillow for many months, as it offered me such needed solace and relief from my emotional pain. A revised and updated version of the book was published in 2013, and it is now 479 pages! I can't recommend it highly enough.

Aside from just recommending it to anyone who is seriously interested in learning about the disease, I also mention it to highlight the fact that Sigmund Freud's theories about schizophrenia occupy exactly one paragraph in the book, in a section entitled "Obsolete Theories." Here is that paragraph:

For the first half of the twentieth century, Freud's psychoanalytic theories were prominent in the United States. Freud taught that bad mothering causes schizophrenia. Freud himself knew almost nothing about the disease and avoided seeing patients who had it. In a 1907 letter, he acknowledged: "I seldom see dements [dementia praecox, or schizophrenia] and hardly ever see other severe types of psychosis." Four years later he wrote: "I do not like these patients [with schizophrenia]...I feel them to be so far distant from me and everything human." Any mental health professional who still professes Freudian beliefs about schizophrenia should be regarded as incompetent." (Empahsis added)

Freud's ego, like your father's (from the sound of it), was a very frail one. The Buddhist fix on ego is the one I feel is the most accurate. Ego is, in fact, the sum total of all our defense mechanisms! And at heart, what are we defending ourselves from? From that queazy, sickening awareness just below our consciousness that there's no "ground beneath our feet," as Pema Chodron,the Buddhist nun, puts it. "We're always looking for a permanent reference point, and it doesn't exist," she writes. "Everything is always changing - fluid, unfixed and open. Nothing is pin-downable the way we'd like it to be. This is not actually bad news, but we all seem to be programmed for denial. We have absolutely no tolerance for uncertainty." (Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, pp. 17-18)

When the ego isn't firmly in place (and for people with personality disorders, that is generally the case - at the core of the disorder is an ego plagued with deep, unutterably painful shame), that shifting nature of reality equates with madness, and it is avidly feared and to be avoided at all costs. In essence, it was this that provoked the split between Jung and Freud, the master and his protégé. (Freud even referred to Jung in the early phase of their relationship as his "son".) When Jung encountered Freud's underlying fear and resistance to acknowledging that what we call "reality" is just an illusion (or at the very least, entirely relative), and his great need to put ground under his feet by insisting on his ultimate and definitive understanding of the human psyche, Jung knew he could no longer work with Freud as his vision, and indeed his own psyche, was too frail. This was a deeply tragic realization for Jung. In his later years, he wrote about how sad it made him to have been unable to get to a point of reconciliation with his former mentor...