Love and Identification with the Beloved

Abstract I challenge the claim behind Harry Frankfurt’s infamous treatment of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia as tantamount to self-sacrifice—namely, that identification with one’s beloved is ‘conceptually necessary’ for love of any form. Because this claim is rooted in Frankfurt’s conception of self-love as the ‘purest’ form of love, with parents’ love of their offspring a close second, I appeal to the conceptual coherence of two accounts of love that fail to assume any such identification (either psychological or ontological) and also treat mothers’ love for their children as paradigmatic of concern for another qua other: Aristotle’s account of the (ideal) friend as an ‘other self’, which properly read makes no demand for identification; and Iris Murdoch’s ideal of ‘unselfing’, which seems to reject the demand for identification. The essay concludes by comparing Frankfurt’s treatment of Agamemnon’s sacrifice with Sethe’s sacrifice of her daughter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.