July 1 & 8, 2026, Two Online sessions with Dr. Aaron B. Daniels

Aaron B. Daniels, PhD, is an Associate Teaching Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, where he leads the Psychological Humanities at Northeastern University (PH@NU), a trans- and interdisciplinary workgroup producing conference research presentations. His path to this work—and to a vocation he loves—has been anything but linear.

Dr. Daniels’s clinical career began with outreach to unhoused individuals experiencing severe mental illness in Seattle, moved through community mental health counseling and psychotherapy, and culminated in a private practice specializing in work with sexual minority clients. His decade of clinical experience profoundly shapes his teaching, offering students a practitioner’s perspective on the depths of personality.

The academic path proved equally crooked. Dr. Daniels navigated community college teaching, part-time appointments at graduate schools, positions at struggling small liberal arts colleges, and—unexpectedly—found a welcoming home in a neurobiology-focused department at a most selective R1 university. Along the way, he discerned a call to Episcopal priesthood, which ultimately led not to ordination but to training as a spiritual director. He now serves directees leads weekly meditations at Northeastern’s Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service, and mentors meditation leaders.

In these two sessions, Dr. Daniels will trace this crooked path and offer practical wisdom for those navigating their own. Topics will include strategies for entering the world of academic conferences—from attendance through posters and papers to leveraging presentations into publications. He will address the tumultuous landscape of publishing, the complexities of licensure and insurance panels, the importance of mentoring and networking, clinical and peer supervision, and the role of location-specific knowledge in building a sustainable career.

Threading through these practical considerations is a fundamental conviction that has both challenged and empowered Dr. Daniels’s journey: that quantitative, materialist approaches to psyche—that is, to soul—betray and diminish our lives and vocations, and that phenomenological, depth approaches offer a necessary corrective. His work has also been informed, and at times haunted, by apophatic mysticism and its call toward Sacred Nothingness. What he has discovered is that a Psychological Humanities approach—as articulated by Mark Freeman—creates space for discussions that open students and practitioners alike to the transformations such convictions make possible.

Dr. Daniels holds an MA from Duquesne University and a PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute, during James Hillman’s residency. He is the author of works on Jungian criminal profiling, Dante as proto-phenomenologist, encounters with the inscrutably alien, and a forthcoming work on spiritual direction. He is currently working on a study of Daniel Craig’s James Bond as Sacrificial King.