Rembrandt
The Christian injunction 'Love Your Neighbour as Yourself'
has problems. One can or may love you neighbour, but one cannot love oneself as one loves another, in an unmediated way.
Regarding this so called love of 'self', Soren Kierkegaard argues that there is no self-love that is not illusion - since the party who loves - and who is at stake loves only the other and not essentially himself or herself.
I may feel the other's love for myself, I may want to be loved, I can imagine and anticipate being loved by my neighbour. Yet what I term 'love' towards my neigbour, my neighbour may determine it is not love, as s/he may require more or less.
Then we have the problem of loving oneself. In doing so you are presuming a 'self' exists. And if a self exists where exactly might it be residing?
In the metaphysical notions of one's 'mind' or 'soul'. Or in the homunculus (Latin for "little human", a term used, in various fields of study to refer to any representation of a human being).
So I am endeavouring to love the essential me. To find me or the homunculus that is me, is to enter into a Kafkaesque never ending knocking on doors. Does the essential me reside here? No, try next door...ad infinitum
Human beings are irreducibly heterogeneous. To love oneself there has to be someone doing the loving 'I' to some other 'thou'.
There many commentators who view commandments/injunctions such as 'Love Your Neighbour as Yourself' as words passed down by illiterate goat herders.
But perhaps that is being a little unkind towards one's
neighbours.
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