As Freud so cogently indicated, abstractions employed in early stages of theory formation are often inadequate, although useful, and should later be replaced by more effective explanatory principles. Two common characteristics of preliminary abstractions are their necessary redundancy and their excessive closeness to the phenomena they are intended to explain. As a result, preliminary abstractions concerning fields of forces, including the field of forces that is the human organism, usually involve redundant

abstractions whose interrelationships are conceived in terms of force and counterforce at the level of pairs or groups of component forces or structures. More adequate and parsimonious concepts of such fields of forces require that the theoretician view each part process from the vantage point of the totality, rather than attempt to construct a totality by postulating more and more elaborate combinations of low-order abstractions.