As a middle-aged clinical psychologist and childless woman, I am no longer surprised by women and couples withdrawing from traditional family planning and expressing little interest in childrearing. By my estimate, only about a third display what culture calls a maternal instinct.

The so-called “maternal instinct” is not a scientific construct but a cultural myth—a story derived from patterns of nurturing behaviors awakened by hormonal and neurochemical elixirs inducing love, bonding, and caretaking.

My clients span a striking diversity of age, class, and geography: younger and older adults, from working class to the 0.1 percent; urban professionals and rural dwellers; nationals, foreigners, immigrants of all skin colors. Yet, across this wide range, many express something between indifference and aversion toward pregnancy or parenting.

The “culprits” of this sentiment are well known—financial strain (how will we pay for childcare or larger dwells?), newly attained women’s rights, professional ambitions. My young clients express hopelessness about climate and politics. My single clients anguish over demographic imbalance and the rise of emotionally unavailable partners. For years, I rationalized my own ambivalence with similar explanations.

Some might argue that my sample is biased—that a childless, unconventional therapist attracts clients of similar outlook. Yet the drop in childbearing is not limited to my office. It is actually a global phenomenon, well documented across cultures. 

The Birthgap Phenomenon

Demographer Stephen J. Shaw, originator of the Birthgap theory, argues that the worldwide decline in births is not a slow drift from high to low fertility, but a synchronized collapse of first births among women in their twenties. Because many delay childbearing and never “catch up,” entire generations contract unexpectedly.

What is most fascinating is the synchrony of this decline. The trend appears almost simultaneously across nations—Japan, Germany, the United States, Uruguay—societies with entirely different histories, policies, and faiths. How do such distant societies—so divergent in history, policies, and culture— converge so precisely without intentional coordination?

(More interactive charts can be viewed at the United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024.) 

Economic and cultural explanations abound for the birth rate decline—education, contraception, urbanization, women’s empowerment, housing costs—but none explain the precision of the synchronical pattern among very distant and diverse groups. Economics in particular seems an inadequate explanation: the theory of efficient, rational markets formed by individuals making optimal financial decisions has been proven fictitious; contemporary societies are wealthier than ever—more than most in earlier generations—and many of those who forgo parenthood could be abundantly able to do finance a childrearing. In fact, many of these individuals claiming financial stress as a reason to deprioritize parenthood are often the ones investing in expensive fertility preservation, IVF treatments or surrogacy planning, all of them designed to postpone, sometimes indefinitely, the decision and consequences of childbearing. These trends signal the deep ambivalence the prospect of parenting evokes nowadays.

As the commonplace answers failed to convince me, I began to look elsewhere. In the interest of simplicity, I suspend my curiosity about the fact that similarly, human sexual activity and interest is also declining precipitously, which I suspect is subjected to the same forces. Could there be deeper, less tangible vectors at play, shaping our desires and actions, beyond our conscious rationalizations?

Morphic Resonance Fields

I find that Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance offers an intriguing —and controversial— model of explanation. Sheldrake proposes that nature itself has memory. When a new form or pattern of behavior appears in any organism, it leaves an informational trace in a morphic field. As the pattern is repeated, the field strengthens, making it increasingly easier for the same pattern to reappear elsewhere—not through imitation or genetic transmission, but through resonance with the collective memory of the field. 

Applied to human reproduction, once a critical mass of societies delayed or abandoned early childbearing, that behavioral template may have been imprinted into a collective resonance field. Others, unconsciously attuned, reproduced it—forming synchronized global trends without coordination or awareness; cultural contagion is not transmitted by media alone, but by resonance, the subtle energetic fields crossing space and time. 

The Bridge to Jung: Archetypes as Psychic Fields

As a psychologist steeped in both empirical and mythopoetic traditions, I see an intersection between Sheldrake’s theory and Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes.

Jung’s body of work reveals that beneath individual psychology lies the collective unconscious—a psychic matrix structured by archetypes, the universal patterns that shape human thought, emotion, and behavior.

Just as morphic fields organize biological patterns, archetypes organize psychic ones. Sheldrake speaks of resonance through energy; Jung speaks of resonance through meaning. Both describe nonlocal patterns of influence that ripple through humanity.

Brought together, they form a two-layered model:

• Morphic resonance as the outer, behavioral field shaping what societies do.

• Archetypes as the inner, symbolic field shaping what societies mean by what they do.

Is the Birthgap, then, not just demographic but archetypal—a field-level shift in the psychic architecture of our species?

Archetypes Morphing: From Mother to Seeker

In my clinical work, the so-called maternal instinct is not a fixed biological drive but rather a myth. At times it presents itself through very genuine expressions of love, nurturing and bonding with a child. Many other times, a mutable expression of the deeper species mandate for generativity takes the stage as an impetus, a moving-forward toward continuation and creation.

While for centuries motherhood was the primary socially sanctioned form of generativity—especially so for women—currently the possibilities of self-expression and self-realization has dramatically widened. The maturational stage of generativity is now expressed not just biologically, through parenting, but also symbolically, through art, spirituality, service, and multiple forms of creativity and innovation. The same life force that once moved through womb and lineage now finds outlets in creativity, activism, and exploration. The maternal instinct has not vanished—it has morphed. 

For most of human history, the Mother archetype anchored the psyche’s center of gravity, symbolizing renewal and care. In our era, however, the Seeker, the Explorer, and the Inventor have risen—archetypes oriented toward expansion and transcendence. They appear in our fascination with “experiences”, our pursuit of technology advancements, interplanetary travel, and self-optimization—the same generative impulse is being redirected now toward non-biological pursuits. 

Collective Shifts in the Field

From a Jung–Sheldrake perspective, this archetypal and behavioral shift are two expressions of one phenomenon. As the Seeker and Explorer rise, the Mother archetype recedes; birthrates fall accordingly.

Our artificial intelligences and cosmic ventures may be new faces of the ancient quest for immortality—the desire to extend life and meaning beyond flesh and kin.

If Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and Jung’s archetypal fields are two faces of one pattern, then the Birthgap marks a species-wide reorganization of purpose—a migration from biological to symbolic reproduction.

As a clinician, I do not see this as pathology or catastrophe but as evolution or permutation—one that invites awe and unease in equal measure. Adventures are ahead, yet many unsettling questions arise: Who will be creating and producing to satisfy our basic needs? Who will care for our elders? Who will tend the fragile ecosystems of human connection? Is this transformation a birth of a new consciousness—or the quiet suicide of an old one in absence of a better path toward new better social rearrangements?

In my practice, I hear both relief and grief: “people are hard,” clients say, “animals are easier.” Behind the liberation lies a quiet melancholy—the freedom to self-direct one’s life shadowed by the loss of something ancient and unquestioned.

Where Are We Headed Now?

If the Birthgap signals a turning in the morphic and archetypal fields, humanity may be standing at a threshold rather than marching toward a clear destination. The shift from procreation to creation could mark a new form of generativity—one in which meaning, innovation, and consciousness itself become the legacy once carried by offspring.

Yet the same transformation that promises liberation may also carry hidden costs. As reproductive ties weaken, so might the structures that have long sustained empathy, continuity, and care. Societies could grow more fragmented, aging populations more isolated, the sense of lineage replaced by transient networks and digital surrogates. A civilization that ceases to reproduce biologically may, in time, lose some of the stabilizing instincts that once bound generations together.

Still, it would be naïve to assume decline is inevitable. New forms of kinship, cooperation, and symbolic parenthood may yet emerge—less rooted in blood or cultural mandate, more in shared consciousness. Morphic fields may be reorganizing, rather than collapsing. So far, humanity as a species has proven quite resilient, snapping out of crises just as they become catastrophic, not without undergoing terrific losses in the process.

We stand in times of deep uncertainty and transformation: neither fully abandoning the ancient pull of the Mother archetype nor entirely committing to its new expressions. Will this pattern lead us to renewal or diminishment of our kind? I remain uncertain about the answer to this question. Does renewal rest on how much awareness—and humility—we bring to the forces that move, imperceptibly, through us? Does our species show overall progress in awareness? Not enough, I am afraid. I am inclined to believe that only a collapse of our current order—at a planetary level— will create the conditions for a new order, a reset in values and customs that redirects us to a kinship with nature and a re-prioritization of human life, relationships and love.

Such collapse may take decades and bring with it massive destruction, as advocacy—with its typically meager resources—appears unable to pivot the trajectory of highly techno-militarized governing forces. Meanwhile, I believe, we are held prisoners in a civilization of decay, where the best and perhaps only course of action may be to “cultivate our own garden.” That is, until this next cycle of “death and rebirth” brings us back to living in reverence for Nature and in awe of the Cosmos—rather than in competition with them.

See you on the other side?