Love, Friendship, and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of PersonsRecent Western thought has consistently emphasized the individualistic strand in our understanding of persons at the expense of the social strand. Thus, it is generally thought that persons are self determining and autonomous, where these are understood to be capacities we exercise most fully on our own, apart from others, whose influence on us tends to undermine that autonomy. Love, Friendship, and the Self argues that we must reject a strongly