Only partly, and mostly as an ideal. Human love ordinarily contains need—attachment, the desire for the person's presence and response—so love entirely free of need is not the normal human case and may be incoherent for creatures built like us. But the question conceals a real and achievable distinction: you can love with the possessive, using kind of need greatly reduced, loving the person for their own sake rather than for what they supply you.
Two very different things travel under "need".
There is need-love: the attachment, longing, and desire for reciprocity that are part of caring about someone at all—wanting them near, wanting to be loved back.
And there is instrumental or possessive need: loving someone for the security, status, comfort, or self-completion they provide, where the person is really a means to your own ends.
The first is intrinsic to human love; the second is what corrodes it.
C. S. Lewis distinguished "need-love" from "gift-love" and argued that even need-love is not contemptible—an infant's love for its mother is need through and through, and healthy.
The mature move is not to eliminate need but to add gift-love: to want the beloved's good for their sake, independent of what they do for you, so that your care would survive their ceasing to meet your needs.
Purely needless love, by contrast, can shade into indifference—a "love" that needs nothing from you may not be very invested in you.
So the honest answer distinguishes the ideal from the pathology:
you probably cannot, and need not, love without any need; you can and should love without using—without making the person a mere instrument of your own security. The test is whether you will the beloved's flourishing even when it costs you or asks nothing back. Keep the attachment and prune the possession: love that grips and consumes is need gone wrong; love that gives while still wanting is need rightly ordered. This would need revision if human love could be shown to persist with no attachment or desire for the other at all—characteristically it does not.
Partly—and mostly as an ideal to aim at, not a state you fully reach. Some need is baked into human love (attachment, wanting the person near, wanting to be loved back), so love with zero need isn't the normal human case and might not even make sense for creatures like us. But the question hides a real, achievable distinction: you can love with the possessive, using kind of need turned way down.
Two different things get called "need":
C. S. Lewis made the useful split between "need-love" and "gift-love," and pointed out that even need-love isn't shameful—a baby's love for its mother is pure need, and perfectly healthy. The mature move isn't to delete need; it's to add gift-love: wanting the person's good for their own sake, so your care would survive them no longer meeting your needs. (Notice, too, that totally needless "love" can curdle into indifference—if I need nothing from you, maybe I'm not very invested in you.)
So the real answer: you probably can't, and needn't, love without any need—but you can and should love without using. The test is whether you'd will the person's flourishing even when it costs you or gives you nothing back.
Practical version: keep the attachment, prune the possession. Love that grips and consumes is need gone wrong. Love that gives while still wanting is need rightly ordered.
Two Kinds of Love.
C. S. Lewis drew a line between "need-love" and "gift-love"—the love that reaches out because it lacks, and the love that pours out because it overflows. We are taught to admire only the second and be ashamed of the first, to imagine the ideal lover as gloriously self-sufficient, needing nothing. But Lewis resisted this. The child running to its mother is need-love entire, and there is nothing base in it; to need those we love is not a failure of love but often its most honest form. The fantasy of loving without needing may be less a spiritual achievement than a kind of pride—the refusal to admit that we are creatures who depend, who reach, who cannot be whole alone.
The Hungry Ghost.
And yet there is a need that poisons love, and we all know it when we see it. In Buddhist iconography the hungry ghost has a vast empty belly and a mouth too small to fill it—forever ravenous, never satisfied. Some love is like this: not a giving but a devouring, a bottomless demand that the other person fill an inner emptiness they can never fill, because the emptiness was never really about them. This is need as consumption—the love that grips, monitors, engulfs, that needs the beloved the way an addict needs a substance. The tragedy is that it often destroys the very thing it clutches at, because no person can survive being made responsible for another's entire sense of being okay. This is need gone cancerous, and it is the opposite of love wearing love's clothes.
The Love That Wants Nothing Back.
At the far pole stands an ideal that many traditions revere: agape, the bodhisattva's boundless compassion, the love that seeks nothing for itself and radiates equally toward all. It is genuinely beautiful, and genuinely possible in flashes—the stranger's kindness, the parent's 3 a.m. selflessness, the caregiver who asks nothing. But it carries a subtle danger when made the whole of love. A love aimed at everyone can fail to truly love anyone; a compassion that needs nothing from you may also not particularly need you, may love the abstraction of a suffering being rather than the specific, maddening, irreplaceable person you are. To be loved is, in part, to be needed—to matter enough that your absence would leave a hole. Perfect detachment can look, from the inside, a lot like not being chosen.
The Wall Called "I Don't Need You."
Notice, too, how often "I don't need anyone" is not strength but armor. To need someone is to hand them power over your happiness, to become woundable—and the person who has decided never to need again is usually not enlightened but hurt, building a fortress out of self-sufficiency. "I love you but I don't need you" can be whispered as tenderness and function as a threat: you cannot hurt me, because I have made sure I can live without you. Real intimacy requires the terrifying opposite—the willingness to say, and mean, I need you, and if you left it would break something in me. The love that has eliminated all need may have eliminated all vulnerability, and love without vulnerability is a contradiction.
Needing Without Grasping.
So the answer is not either pole but the difficult middle: to need without grasping, to depend without devouring. The healthiest love is not two halves completing each other, nor two islands touching at no point, but two reasonably whole people who have freely chosen to make their lives depend on one another—interdependence, not fusion and not indifference. There is a world of difference between "I need you to complete me," which is the hungry ghost, and "I have built my life around you and would grieve to lose you," which is simply what it means to love a mortal being you cannot control. The mature lover needs the beloved and could, if they had to, survive without them—and it is precisely that second fact that makes the first one safe. To need someone freely, from wholeness rather than from lack, and to hold them with an open hand: that may be the closest we come. Not love without need, but need without grasping. Not the absence of hunger, but a hunger that has learned to give.
You cannot love wholly without need—attachment and the desire for the person's presence and response are intrinsic to human love, and a "love" that needs nothing may be closer to indifference than to devotion. But the question hides a real and achievable distinction between two kinds of need: the healthy attachment and longing that are part of caring at all, and the possessive, instrumental need that treats the person as a means to fill one's own emptiness. What corrodes love is the second, not the first. So the mature form is not the elimination of need but its right ordering—needing without grasping, willing the beloved's good for their own sake, holding them with an open hand while still, freely, wanting them.