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I think I can most easily give my appreciation of Dr Wilke's very interesting paper by donning two hats in rapid succession; that of the therapist and that of the scientist and theoretician.
As a therapist I gained valuable insights into the feelings and subjective experiences of these patients. The atmosphere conveyed by the words ‘moon goddess’ is so much richer, at least to a Jungian, than the mere use of such words as ‘symbiotic relationship with a distant, cold or anxious mother’. This latter formulation is of course quite valid. It is not in my opinion competitive with Wilke's formulation, but is needed to supplement it.
If we take Richter's formulation of the mother-child relationship, as summarized by Wilke, and add to it Wilke's ‘Jungian’ sensitivity, and if we add to these our knowledge from the literature that these patients very often have mothers, fathers, or siblings with heart disease or chronic illness (e.g. 72 per cent of a large series described by Mendelenyi and Marton, 1964)