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About Robert Aziz

The professional career of Robert Aziz Ph.D. simultaneously follows four distinct, yet not unrelated paths as a scholar, psychoanalytical psychotherapist, executive mentor within the business sector and cultural commentator.

Aziz has lectured at two Ontario universities on the psychology of the unconscious. At Wilfrid Laurier University, he taught both undergraduate and graduate courses dealing with Freudian and Jungian theories of the psychology of religion. At the University of Western Ontario, he offered a series of lectures, for eight consecutive years, titled Jungian Psychology and the Search for Meaning.

Aziz is acknowledged internationally for his scholarship in the area of depth psychology. His book C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (1990), currently in its 10th printing, is a refereed publication of The State University of New York Press. That key arguments from this book have found their way into publications such as The Cambridge Companion to Jung (1997) attests to its merit as a leading-edge theoretical work. "Aziz," a reviewer writes in the Journal of Exceptional Human Experience, "can be credited with completing Jung’s thinking in regard to both synchronicity and the psychology of religion."

In 2005 Aziz brought to completion a ten-year scholarly project. The resultant manuscript underwent academic review and was accepted for publication by the Board of The State University of New York Press. The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung was released in February 2007 and has been critically acclaimed as a comprehensive, clinically based work that reaches beyond the theoretical contributions of Freud and Jung. "Lucidly written and richly illustrated with clinical material," Dr. Roderick Main, Director of the Centre for Psychoanalytical Studies, University of Essex, England, writes, "Aziz’s book goes beyond highlighting problems in Jungian and Freudian theory to propose a cogent new model that resolves them."

Aziz was honored with the distinction of being one of five scholars invited by The Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education (Tokyo) to contribute a chapter to their commemorative publication Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics (1999). The Uehiro Foundation has most recently been noted for its joint projects with the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, as well as for the Foundation’s sponsorship of a permanent chair in applied ethics at the University of Oxford.

Since 1988 Aziz has maintained a full-time analytical practice. His clinical work with individuals typically is both in-depth and long-term, utilizing dream analysis as a means of accounting for both conscious and unconscious dynamics. As a specialist in his field, his analytical practice reaches beyond the community within which he resides to include individuals living throughout Canada and the United States. Aziz is a Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. He is a Clinical Member of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists. He is also a member of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association Section on Psychoanalysis.

As with his analytical practice, Aziz’s consultancy work in the business sector is North American in its geographical scope. Bringing his depth understanding of individual personality and interpersonal dynamics to bear on his work as an executive consultant and mentor, Aziz provides professional direction to executives and executive teams leading an array of businesses throughout Canada and the United States. Underpinning his approach to business consultancy—either as an executive mentor or as a facilitator of executive team dynamics—is Aziz’s long-held belief in the critical linkage between productivity and the dynamics of meaning. Organizational productivity is dependent on meaning; meaning is dependent on the conscious and functional processing of information and human experience—a formula and indeed organizational challenge which demands as much of those individuals at the center of business units in leadership roles, as it does of the functionality of a business unit in its entirety. With this leadership demand in mind, it is the case, accordingly, that all consultancy work necessarily begins with and proceeds by way of executive coaching and leadership development.

As Aziz brought to completion The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung his attention turned directly to the explication of the political and cultural implications of the conclusions reached in that work. His most recent book titled Democracy and Self-Organization: The Change of Which Barack Obama Speaks constitutes his first step in that direction. Describing these developments in one of his blog entries on The Huffington Post titled, "Democracy Unbound: The Freeing of Democratic Process from the Tyranny of False Absolutes and False Certainties," Aziz writes: "For some thirty years, in the form of research and writing, which culminated in the publication of two scholarly books in the area of the psychology of the unconscious; in the form of my clinical work as a psychoanalytical therapist; and in the form of my consultancy as an executive mentor within the North American business sector, I have engaged the problem of our current cultural crisis of meaning. Now although during those years the political implications of the conclusions I had reached were not lost on me, I did not feel compelled to dedicate a treatise to their explication. 9/11 and the subsequent actions of democratic nations, however, changed all of this; for in the politics and militarism of the post-9/11 period, the ultimate futility of the false premise of the old paradigm that placed power in the form of false absolutes and false certainties above process and dynamic meaning was forced upon democratic culture with a vengeance. With the completion of The Syndetic Paradigm (2007), accordingly, the presentation of the political implications of my conclusions became my deepest concern. By way of the candidacy of Barack Obama I was afforded the opportunity to proceed. The resultant book is titled Democracy and Self-Organization: The Change of Which Barack Obama Speaks (2008)."

Aziz was honored to have been invited by Dr. Lance Storm of the University of Adelaide, Australia to contribute the Foreword to Synchronicity: Multiple Perspectives on Meaningful Coincidence (2008), which is a remarkable collection of scholarly, clinical and experimental research papers from the foremost experts on this subject.

In October 2010 Aziz accepted an invitation to be a key participant in a series of roundtable discussions at Yale University. The Synchro Summit, conducted under the auspices of the Yale Initiative in Religion, Science and Technology, brought together an international group of 19 subject matter experts for three days of energetic and stimulating discussion on the subject of synchronicity and its implications.

Aziz is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

In May 2012 Robert Aziz received an invitation from The Times of India to join as a 'Master' their global spiritual networking website, The Speaking Tree. Launched in 2010, The Speaking Tree website has 90,000 registered participants and receives over 1,000,000 monthly page views. Featured articles from The Speaking Tree are presented in print in The Times of India both daily on the Edit Page (The Times of Ideas) and in their weekly publication The Speaking Tree Sunday. The World Association of Newspapers lists The Times of India as the largest selling English language newspaper in the world.