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Alf Nilsson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Lund University, Sweden, continues to organize his professional knowledge and experience in a stream of publications about the development of mental man. A few years ago, he published “The rise of homo pychicus - a biopsychological phantasy” [Om Homo psychicus uppkomst - en biopsykologisk fantasi] in which he put affects, cognition and language into an evolutionary, psychological and biological developmental perspective. In his latest book “The unconscious in a new perspective”, he has taken on a task that Freud began but never completed: combining an evolutionary and developmental psychological perspective on the unconscious as a system. This inner reality is, according to Freud, just as accessible to direct experience as is external reality.
One of Alf Nilsson's main points of entry into his subject matter is touch, the sensory as well as the emotional, which come together in the early life of the infant in the body contact with the mother in the breast-feeding situation. Another point of departure for Nilsson is that the existence of the unconscious as a system has been established by psychoanalysis as well as by general psychology. He formulates four hypotheses about the unconscious thus conceived:
the unconscious is the stuff out of which all developed mental capacities grows.
there is no conscious thinking, experiencing or feeling without a continuously motivating driving activity in the unconscious
when unconscious images are established, they constitute undestroyable facts
man is basically unable to reach the absolute truth about the unconscious inside of himself
Nilsson starts with a presentation of Freud's formulations about the unconscious, the repressed as well as the not repressed yet not consciously experienced perceptions. The elucidations he gives of Freud's formulations are from The interpretation of dreams, later publications, and from circumstances of Freud's personal life and the socio-political events o