Hillman is not writing against love for a child. He is writing against a specific substitution — the moment a child becomes the container for a longing the adult cannot bear to locate in themselves. That longing has a name in Hillman's vocabulary: the daimon, the image you arrived with, the thing that has been insisting on itself since before you had language for it. When that insistence goes unmet long enough, the soul does not simply wait. It relocates the urgency into something adjacent and answerable — a child's future, a child's flourishing, a child's becoming what you would not let yourself become.

The sentence does not end with diagnosis. It ends with a demand: your work as a parent, as anyone alive in a community, is to make the world hospitable to invisible callings — not to absorb them into visible projects, however tender. That hospitality requires that you stay in some functional relationship with your own daimon. Not realized, not resolved, not healed — just not entirely abandoned. The child cannot carry that image for you. Neither can any child. What Hillman is pointing at is not a failure of parenting but a failure of the adult to remain accountable to the thing that was never the child's to hold.