Anne Maclachlan
Clinical Psychologist
Community Substance Misuse Team,
Portico House, Wellington,
Telford
01952 222229

I work part time as a clinical psychologist based in the Tier 3 community substance misuse service.

I grew up with a psychiatric context but I think I first became interested in psychology/
psychotherapy as a teenager while reading 'DIBS in Search of Self' by Virginia Axline.
I was fascinated by her account of a transformational therapeutic relationship with a six
year old boy.

I had my first experience of a formal therapeutic relationship aged 18 when I worked with
a gestalt therapist. Partly as a result of this I decided to study psychology at Edinburgh
University where I completed a degree in 1991. My main influence there was Halla Beloff
who lectured in social psychology and who has written about shyness, photography, the
Northern Ireland conflict and the psychology of clothes among many other things. It was she
who got me reading Foucault and Valerie Walkerdine as opposed to Freud and Eysenck.

I was also interested in the conflict within the larger department between those who believed
that the empirical positivistic scientific method was relevant to human research and those who
preferred a more feminist approach and embraced the 'new paradigms' of more qualitative
and discourse-led approaches to human psychology.

I spent a year juggling being a scientific officer at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in
Cambridge with being a voluntary worker at a Mental After Care Association hostel in
London. The following year I did some training at the psychosynthesis and education trust and
worked as a social therapist at the Henderson Hospital; a therapeutic community in Surrey.

• I studied Clinical Psychology in Birmingham.
• I returned from working in London to rejoin this department in 1997.
• I have become a user of psychiatric services.
• My current and longstanding interests are in paradox, stories and dreams and early
  interventions in psychosis that are less harmful to people.
  
  "We are, as it were, doomed to 'grasp' reality only through our interpretation of
  it, and hence we cannot really grasp it at all. But we can, as I shall also argue,
  have respect for it: we may dream recklessly, or we may go carefully because
  we know we are dreaming"
  David Smail (1987) in Taking Care
  
  Publications
  Newnes, C. and Maclachlan, A. (1996) The antipsychiatry placement. Clinical Psychology
  Forum, 93 24-27.
  Maclachlan, A. (1996) A survey of Patients' Councils in Britain. Clinical Psychology Forum,
  98 19-22
  Maclachlan, A. and Newnes, C. (2002) The Information. Clinical Psychology, 16, 12-15.