This book has had a long genesis. An early draft was completed in 1994, focusing on psychology's language. 1994 also saw my first attempts to democratise the dynamics of language within the classes I taught, often with surprising and inspiring results, thanks to the quality of my students in North Queensland. On the strength of these experiments, I proposed to write a new kind of textbook for psychology, using an experience-based pedagogy. Publishers responded cautiously to this idea. They could see that students might well favour an experience-based approach. But they argued a different kind of book needed to precede such a textbook, making the case for rethinking the place of experience in psychology.

The book's history makes sense of its form. I set out by debating the discipline's pedagogy, arguing the need for both students and teachers to be aware of the ‘here and now’ of collective classroom experience. The next five chapters go on to examine in detail the psychological research and theory that cast light on the ‘here and now’, arguing immediate experience to be constituted through a synchronic field of intersubjectivity. I show that this argument has a powerful bearing on how psychologists approach explanation and understand change. Chapters 8 and 9 then return to practical questions, demonstrating how the conceptual framework worked out in the book makes good sense of research and reframes the curriculum in psychology.