Description
Lorenz Clinic of Family Psychology — Greater Minneapolis St Paul Area, Full-Time | Doctoral Degree Required | Formation-Based Clinical Training Institute
Something has shifted in behavioral health training. The institutions that once held clinicians well — university programs with genuine intellectual communities, postdoctoral environments with time to think, clinical institutes with formation at their center — are under unprecedented pressure. Many have contracted, consolidated, or quietly stopped doing the formative work that made them worth belonging to.
Lorenz Clinic is building in the other direction.
We are a multi-site outpatient family psychology practice organized around a serious proposition: that the relational environment a clinician inhabits during training is not incidental to their development — it is the curriculum. We believe clinics are not merely service delivery systems. At their best, they are civic institutions — places where human beings are shaped into the kinds of practitioners, leaders, and citizens upon whom a fragile democratic society depends. We take that seriously. Not as aspiration. As architecture.
Our clinical training programs span the full formation ladder: practicum, post-master's fellowship, clinical supervision, and leadership development across five sites. Together they constitute a formation system designed to move clinicians through developmental thresholds — from earliest supervised practice through independent licensure, through the stewardship of supervision, and toward the civic practice of clinical leadership — with deliberate containment at each stage.
Our long-range vision is to be a clinical training institute: therapy, training, research, and clinical leadership development operating in concert. Not a clinic that trains. An institute that treats and forms the field.
We are looking for a Training Faculty member who understands what it would mean to help build that.
What distinguishes serious clinical training from credential production is a willingness to name and hold developmental thresholds explicitly — to treat professional formation as a staged process with real transitions, not a continuous accumulation of hours and signatures.
We organize training around a conviction that each stage of clinical development involves a qualitative shift in what is being held — not just more skill, but a different object of responsibility. Practicum students learn to hold themselves in role and hold the client system. Post-master's fellows consolidate clinical identity and develop the first forms of independent judgment. Clinical supervisors cross the most consequential threshold: they become responsible not only for their own work, but for the conditions under which others develop. Managers and directors learn to hold teams and systems. At the highest levels of clinical leadership, the object of responsibility expands to the institution itself — and to its obligations beyond its own walls.
Training Faculty work across this entire developmental arc. Their work is not remediation. It is formation. And formation, as we practice it, is a deliberate discipline: named thresholds, explicit authority, deliberate pacing, and the willingness to say not yet when the stakes require it.
Training Faculty work within a structured faculty model led by an Associate Training Director, who holds program-level stewardship for the formation rung. The Associate Training Director reports directly to the CEO, who holds the full formation ladder and maintains direct involvement in the intellectual and developmental architecture of the training program. Training Faculty carry active scope within the program — clinical, supervisory, and pedagogical — and work in close coordination with training leadership. This is a practitioner-level faculty role, not a program director role. Candidates seeking program leadership or administrative authority over a training program should look to the Associate Training Director posting, which is posted concurrently.
Training Faculty at Lorenz Clinic carry a full scope. This is not a role designed for clinicians seeking to reduce their clinical load through a leadership title. The formation work is additive. It requires more presence, not less — more relational exposure, not less — more tolerance for complexity, not less. The clinical caseload is part of the role. So is everything else.
Depending on fit and organizational need, scope includes:
This is a full role. It requires genuine presence — not managed availability, not partial engagement, not the version of leadership that looks like showing up for the interesting parts. The right candidate will read that sentence and feel confirmed, not cautioned.
We hold a specific view of what a seminar is. It is not a lecture. It is not a workshop. It is a system — and like all systems, it has a primary task, a boundary, and a culture that either supports or undermines the work.
In our seminars, between-participant experience is the pedagogical engine. What participants bring from their own clinical encounters, their supervision relationships, and their developing professional identities becomes the material. The facilitator's task is to hold the conditions under which that material can be examined — without the room retreating into performance, defensive consensus, or the comfort of pure content delivery.
This requires someone who knows what it means to hold a group — not just teach one. Who understands the difference between a room that is thinking and a room that is defending. Who can name a here-and-now dynamic without making it a clinical intervention. Who has been inside a learning system that defended against learning, and knows how to recognize that process without becoming a casualty of it.
Tavistock, A.K. Rice, Bion's theory of groups, the Leicester tradition — these are not required credentials. They are the grammar of the work. Candidates who have been formed in those traditions will recognize immediately what is being described. Candidates who haven't but are drawn to it will find a home here.
Clinicians who are well formed — who have experienced genuine supervisory holding, who have been inside a learning system that took their development seriously, who have practiced the relational and reflective capacities required for good clinical work — carry something into the world. They carry it into the families they treat, into the systems they eventually lead, and into the civic fabric they inhabit. Clinics that take this seriously are not merely health care organizations. They are, as we have come to understand it, civic foundries — places where human beings are shaped into the kinds of clinical citizens upon whom the future of the field depends.
That may sound big for a job posting. We mean it precisely.
The Training Faculty member we are looking for understands that clinical training with this kind of intentionality is civic work within our profession. That forming a clinician to tolerate ambiguity, to repair rupture rather than avoid it, to hold authority without dominance, is preparation not only for clinical practice but for participation in the social fabric at a moment when that fabric is under serious strain.
This is why we are building an institute, not just a training program. And this is why the faculty role is not an administrative position with a teaching component. It is a position of full clinical and intellectual engagement — with all the accountability that entails.
Requirements
Who Excels HereThe right candidate has likely spent time in higher education — as a faculty member, postdoctoral fellow, or advanced graduate student — and has developed serious competencies in teaching, clinical supervision, and group facilitation. They may be re-evaluating what a professional home looks like. Not because they failed at the academic trajectory, but because the landscape has shifted in ways that no longer honor the work they actually care about.
They are drawn to the idea of an institute that takes clinical training seriously as an intellectual, relational, and civic discipline. They want to contribute to something being built with care and intention, not administer something already calcified.
They are still seeing clients and intend to keep doing so. The clinical work is not something they are moving away from. It is something they want to think more carefully about — inside a community that takes that thinking seriously.
They have a felt sense of what happens in a group when authority is unclear, when boundaries dissolve, when a learning system defends against the very thing it is supposed to produce. They have been in those rooms. They know how to name what is happening without making it worse.
They do not need a university to feel like they are doing serious work. But they need the work to be serious.
Submit a curriculum vitae and a cover letter. In the letter, tell us something true about your relationship to the work of clinical training — what you have learned to hold, what you are still learning, and what draws you to an institute that takes formation seriously as both a developmental discipline and a civic one.
We read cover letters with care. What you choose to name, and how you name it, is the first act of the application. Application materials not accompanied by a cover letter will be considered incomplete.
Lorenz Clinic is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and formation-centered training community.