The highlights of the model which was developed during the 1950s at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, under the leadership of Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson, are described in this contribution. Subsequently, it is shown that the field concept –the fundamental tool of the unified model– is not only an intelligent guess to describe the difficult many-body nuclear system. By means of a systematic expansion of field-coupling effects, the nuclear field theory (NFT) accounts for the overcompleteness of the initial product basis and the overlooking of the Pauli principle acting between constituents of the basis. Eventually it leads to the exact solution of the nuclear many-body problem. The description in terms of fields involves another problem if the field violates a symmetry inherent to the initial problem. The solution is borrowed from the BRST treatments of gauge systems, in which the lost symmetry is replaced by a more powerful one.