Having a lambda call itself seems like self-serving functional wankery to me. Lambdas in C++ are nothing but unnamed classes with an () operator. They're blobs of captured values (or references), made immutable by default, that happen to have a function associated with them. If you want to recurse, give the damn thing a name, or rewrite the body in an iterative form.
They do have a name, but unfortunately it's just a compiler-generated one that's not known beforehand. And you would think that because the body of the lambda is really inside an operator(), 'this' could naturally be used to refer to the lambda itself, but alas, it doesn't work:
This is one thing about lambdas that I think the standards folks messed up. Having a lambda call itself might not be such a compelling use case, but it comes from the more general fact that a lambda cannot refer to itself, even though there isn't any reason preventing it from doing so; e.g. being able to pass itself ('this') as a parameter to some other function can be very useful.
