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For kohut, the stated central vehicle for structuralization and therapeutic change was the phenomenon he conceptualized as transmuting internalization. First introduced in 1971 (pp. 49-51), and resting solidly on Freud's theory of the work of mourning, it consisted of three steps: (1) a receptivity for introjects, (2) the “breaking up” of the aspects (psychological functions) of the object via optimal frustration and (3) the depersonalization of those aspects of the object and their transformation into an integral part of the patient's psychic structure. “The internal structure, in other words, now performs the functions which the object used to perform for the child—the well-functioning structure, however, has largely been divested of the personality features of the object” (p. 50).
The “breaking up” process derives from Freud's (1917) explanation of the mechanism of mourning. He had proposed that the libidinal attachment to the lost object (in Freud's context, the loved person who had died) was relinquished bit by bit. “Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (p. 245). In melancholia, then, the freed libido was not invested in another, but in the ego where it “served to establish an identification of the