Maye Taylor

I guess you have arrived at the Maye Taylor website by way of ‘Googling’ my name as a co-author Celebrating Families on current launch, if so, welcome, if by way of other connections, then welcome too!

Currently I divide my time between my ‘Maye Taylor  & Associates’ consultancy which offers psychological coaching to individuals who are looking to make changes in their lives and my extensive work with the people who turn to the Open University to change their lives. I would also add that I intend spending more time on my writing…not sure yet where I am going to find that!  Celebrating Families is the beginning of my next writing phase. (I list a selection of my writings at the end of this personal statement and will make many of these available on this website over the next few months)  My current writing project is a book on those modern women who have made significant contributions to public and family life.

So who is the Maye Taylor of the website?

I have spent my adult life working with ‘ordinary’ women and men, as Teacher, Organisational Consultant, Coach, Counsellor, Expert Witness, Researcher, with all my work firmly rooted in the principles of human rights and justice. I am attached to the Open University in the North West now, teaching a variety of courses and I am involved with several developmental projects aimed at ensuring their continuing quality. Before this I held many senior University posts, I spent some 15 years at The Manchester Metropolitan University for example. I have travelled world wide addressing International Conferences in addition to giving many, many papers at domestic conferences here in the UK.   A glance at a selection of my papers will also illustrate the emphasis of my therapeutic practice.

This lifetime's commitment to equality and justice has its roots in the poverty of my North Manchester working class childhood and started to flourish when aged eleven  I had won a scholarship to North Manchester Girls School and  encountered class prejudice in reality, there were really RICH girls in school! .  I knew about it of course.  Even at that age I was very aware of the social divides and the effects this had on quality of life for families, after all I was going to union meetings with my dad- he was a union man, a working-class hero in our economically and socially very deprived community.  I can remember the first week of term at the High School I opened up my desk to find ‘bigger and better buckets for workers’ inked on the lid I was marked out.  There were some strong women teachers in that school who showed me the link between the class and gender oppression and my lifelong career as an equal rights advocate really began –those women teachers also taught me the importance of communication between adult and child.

I had to leave school as 16 my family could not afford to lose my ‘wages’ so I studied at night school and  worked during the day in factories and offices learning even more about the direct effect of sex discrimination on women's lives – this  was the early sixties! . I passed my A levels, gained a place at Nottingham University to read Social Sciences and a scholarship from Manchester City Council (historically a superb local authority who did much to advance education for working-class girls).  My time at university was a heady mixture of new knowledge and experiences and psychology supplied the conceptual frameworks for understanding prejudice, the methods of confronting it and for taking action that could lead to social change. My early women's groups were a revelation giving me working demonstrations of the benefits of solidarity and support of the kind I had only previously seen between men in the unions. I never looked back – education opened up my own life and thus my children’s. Yes, I managed to have 2 children whilst doing everything else; many of their stories are in the Celebrating Families Book.

Given the current backlash against feminism, which seems to have become the new ‘f’ word, I suppose I am probably now regarded as a dinosaur -but my working life was shaped by my early determination to ensure that everything I did incorporated a concern for human rights and in particular equality for women.  The role education plays in this was and is so very clear and thus my lifetime's devotion to education as the crucial empowerment process began in earnest. My subsequent decision in the early 80s to train in psychoanalytical psychotherapy was a natural progression given the very real possibility for personal change that this approach offered, i.e. a process by which women and men can be taken on a journey of their own experience and helped to identify and clarify those stumbling blocks to more fulfilling lives. I suppose- very simplistically - counselling and therapy are about identifying those things in your life that you cannot change and learning to live more comfortably with them, and identifying those things which you might be able to change and finding ways of achieving that change. This of course is very much the thrust of ‘modern’ psychological coaching. 

Thank you for visiting my website, and reading this. Remember I am just at the end of a phone; much of my individual work is indeed done by phone  e-mail me in the first instance if you would like to make contact to discuss possibilities. 

Maye Taylor
(Dr Maye Taylor. BA. MSc.MEd  PhD AFBPsS)

A  selection of my books and papers

• Maye Taylor   The problem with psychoanalytical interpretation with women in Burman (ed)  Feminists and Psychological Practice. Sage.1990.

Maye Taylor  (with Scott & Smithies. Using Experience: Learning and Training in Community Groups. ARVAC 1990.

Maye Taylor How psychoanalytical thinking lost its way in the hands of men. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling. 1991.

Maye Taylor Research in Psychotherapy  Journal of West Midlands Institute of
Psychotherapy 1992

Maye Taylor (ed) Supervision in Guidance & Counselling. British Journal of Guidnace & Counaelling  1994.Special Edition.

Maye Taylor   Gender & Power in Counselling Supervision. BJGC 1994.  

Maye Taylor  & Bannister, Burman  Parker  Tindall.. Qualitative Methods in Psychology: A Research Guide. Open University Press. Open University. Milton Keynes.1994

Maye Taylor Feminist Psychotherapy.in Walker (ed) In Search of a Therapist. Open University Press. 1994.

Maye Taylor Tuning in: An Interview with Professor Emmy Van Deurzen Smith.  British J ournal of Guidance & Counselling 1994.

Maye Taylor Counselling Psychology. in The Social Science Encyclopedia- Edition 2. ed A & J Kuper.  Routledge  1995.

Maye Taylor   The Feminist Paradigm in Woolfe & Dryden (ed)  Handbook of Counselling Psychology.Sage. 1996.

Maye Taylor Counselling adult survivors of sexual abuse in a climate of false memory debates.
British Psychological Society PAB Symposium published Papers.1997.

Maye Taylor & Farrell D. 1998  CUQ Clinician Rating Scale for PTSD.  Introduced at World Congress on Stress.  Melbourne, Australia

Maye Taylor & Farrrell.D. Impact of childhood abuse.. Changes (Journal of Psychotherapy) 1999.

Maye Taylor & Holmes D & Saaed A. Stalking & The Therapeutic Relationship   Forensic Update. BPS Division of Forensic Psychology. Feb.2000.

Maye Taylor & Farrell.D. Silenced by God.: an examination of unique characteristics of abuse.
Journal of  Counselling Psychology Feb 2001.