This field is a powerful but intangible force, only verifiable (so far) by its effects. Bert Hellinger studied and applied the idea of morphic fields to understand how families work at the transgenerational level.

In family constellations, morphogenetic fields, morphic fields or also called informational fields are mentioned. Morph comes from the Greek word morphe, meaning form. Morphic fields are form fields, patterns or order structures. Quantum physical science has already proven that everything is energy and that energy is information. In family constellations we work with the information of the family system. This information can be generational, it is the information that passed through the family system in spoken form (what our ancestors have told us). Transgenerational information is also present, which is all the unspoken information (secrets, taboos, forgotten, covered or distorted facts, etc). This information is expressed through postures and slow body movements in a family constellation workshop. It comes from the unconscious to the conscious.

Rupert Sheldrake is a British researcher, writer, biochemist and biologist who postulated the most revolutionary hypothesis in contemporary biology: Morphic Resonance. “Morphic Resonance” postulates that each species has its own memory field. This field would be constituted by the forms and attitudes of all the past individuals of that species, and its influence would shape all its forthcoming individuals.

The minds of all the individuals of a species -including man- are united and form part of the same mental field. That mental field-which he called morphogenetic-affects the minds of individuals, and the minds of those individuals would also affect the field. “Each animal, plant or mineral species has a collective memory to which all members of the species contribute and shape”.

Rupert Sheldrake describes the field where genealogical information is connected from a quantum point of view: “There are fields in nature called Morphogenetic fields, which are like invisible organizational structures that mold or shape such things as plants or animals, which also have an organizing effect on behavior”. These Morphogenetic fields contain information gathered from all past history and evolution, something like Freud's “racial memory” or Jung's “collective unconscious” or Timothy Leary's “neurogenetic circuitry”.

Morphic resonance, the principle of collective memory, can be applied to the study of the family tree. Each family has its own collective memory to which all its members are connected and have access. Intergenerational transmission would thus occur in this morphic field, since there is a common memory shared by all members of the clan, whether or not they have lived together in the same spatio-temporal coordinates.

Rupert Sheldrake explains it in his own words as follows:

“What I am beginning to know is that (human) social fields are fields of social group organization, and the easiest way to think of social fields is through flocks of birds. We see a flock of starlings flying in a band that changes direction rapidly, and it is a most amazing sight.

This behavior has puzzled scientists for a long time, because the way these fields composed of individual animals moving and changing direction so quickly is not explicable just in terms of ‘look at your neighbors, see what they are doing, and reply by copying them the same way’. It happens too fast for them to do it that way. The behavior of flocks is based on magnetic field models that treat the whole flock as a field acting on individual flock members. And their position and movement depend on the dynamics of their field.

The same applies to shoals of fish that, again, swim together and can move quickly and change direction without colliding with each other. So, not only they know where their neighbors are, but they know where they are going to go. This phenomenon doesn't just work by observing who they have next to them, it's not just a matter of sensing the pressure of their neighbors, this goes beyond that and has been demonstrated in experiments.

So I think that all these things that have to do with groups of animals are field phenomena. And the field governs them, as I suggest, it's a kind of morphic field that organizes the group. And I think this applies to all animal groups, including families, social groups in the human scope, soccer teams, and so on. It seems to apply to wild animals that are social, it applies to social insects like termites or ants, the coordination of the colony of these insects with very small brains is not in the brain, it's in the field that organizes the individual insects.

When it comes to animals like a pack of wolves, what I suggest is that the whole pack has a field, all the members of the group are connected through this field. When some of the members of the pack leave and leave the others, the field is not broken, but stretched. When a pack of wolves leaves the young wolves in the den, usually with a nanny, while the adults go out hunting, they can travel tens, even hundreds of miles, and the field bond does not break, but stretches like an invisible rubber band and continues to connect the adults to the young, even over long distances. And because they are connected by these fields, I suggest that they remain bound, so, the fact that one of them changes, can affect the others. I think this is the basics of telepathy. I think it is a form of communication between connected members of social groups that works through the group's field. There is already evidence that wolves in the wild are telepathic with each other over long distances.

There is an analogy with this subject in quantum theory. Quantum non-locality is the phenomenon whereby particles that have been part of the same system are connected at a distance when they separate, so that a change in one affects the other at a distance. This is sometimes called identification or entanglement, and provides a strong analogy for telepathy between separate members of social groups. If they are together they feel part of the same system; when they are separated, changing one correlates with a change in the other.

The fields of social groups as morphic fields have a kind of built-in memory. And this is true for human fields as well. For human families, each family has a kind of field and the family field has patterns and habits within it. And this is something that is most graphically illustrated in what psychotherapy calls Systemic Family Constellations. This work was initiated by the German psychologist Bert Hellinger. In group workshops the family is treated as a field. Someone is working with their family of origin and chooses people from the group to represent members of their own family involved in the issue they are dealing with. Then he places them in relation to each other; if their parents were very closeted they place them together, if a family member was very distant and disconnected they place them further away or with their backs to each other. People organize the family the way they want to represent that family group. This creates a kind of family field and the people who are in place of the members often feel emotions that are proper to the person in that position in the family field.

What Hellinger has shown and what many other people who work with this kind of work have shared is that very often patterns in family fields become evident to be repaired. If for example, a family member commits suicide or wants to move away from the clan or is very disconnected; many times that reflects that in a past generation a family member was excluded from the group (either because they delinquent, or were the black sheep or committed suicide, etc) this shows that something is out of balance in the field and it is something that moves unconsciously from generation to generation, while the members are often unaware of this. By going back to the generation where the person was excluded and proceeding to give them their recognition and include them again by bringing them back into the group (through someone representing them in the field), this has a healing effect on the whole family field. It is a remarkable form of therapy.

This is a way in which morphic fields actually interact directly with a particular form of psychotherapy and provide a kind of explanation for some of the remarkable effects that this therapy can produce.”

This could be another way of understanding the collective unconscious and the family unconscious. It would provide a beginning to answer the question of why the secrets and the unspoken of one generation exert such a powerful effect on subsequent generations.