Hillman is pressing on something Plotinus already sensed: the moment you make Eros a state of mind, you have lost him. He becomes a possession — something you can track, manage, perhaps improve. The whole modern therapeutic project quietly bets on this reduction. If love is fundamentally a psychic phenomenon, then it belongs to the person who is experiencing it, and the person can, in principle, do something about it. Plotinus raises the question as genuine perplexity; Hillman raises it as a warning.

The figure Kerényi recovers is far less convenient. An Eros who embraces phallic, psychic, and spiritual dimensions simultaneously, and who exceeds any individual life, cannot be worked on. He works on you. The *metaxy* — that intermediate region Plato's Diotima already described and Hillman keeps returning to — is precisely the space that resists ownership. Neither fully archetypal nor fully personal means there is nowhere to stand that gives you leverage over it. The connections with Hermes are telling here: both figures move across boundaries, both are unreliable as possessions, both operate as communicators between realms you cannot simultaneously inhabit. You do not cultivate a relationship with Hermes. You notice, after the fact, that something moved.