The self-assurance of expert practitioners who publicly present their work can lead everyday therapists to believe that psychotherapy is a far more predictable craft than it actually is. The reality, of course, is much muddier. Therapists on the ground eventually learn that only one mantra applies to every case—it's more complicated than that.

Year after year, therapists have come to the Networker Symposium expecting to escape the turbulence of everyday life and the real world. But this year, attendees came seeking something more—a renewed vision of what we stand for and what our role might be in a toxically polarized society. Here are some of the moments that captured the distinctive flavor of this year’s gathering.

Cross-cultural couples face challenges that often aren’taddressed in therapy.

Philip Zimbardo, the researcher famous for shining a light on our worst authoritarian impulses, has shifted the focus of his work.

The waking-nightmare stories of people wrongfully imprisoned, often for decades, for crimes they didn’t commit expose the flaws in our criminal justice system.

Our compulsive use of digital devices is best understood as the result of their ability to tap into a deep anxiety in the human psyche about “missing out.”

No One Cares about Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

By questioning some of the fundamental premises of traditional marriage, couples therapist Esther Perel has become, at least for the moment, psychotherapy’s public face and most quotable voice. But what is she saying that’s so intriguing and makes her stand out from all the other relationship experts our field produces?

In this issue, we take a stab at understanding this larger social phenomenon, a perilous downward spiral of faultfinding that we might call the National Blame Game. We explore how our country has come to a place of such profound and enraged disunion. And in a spirit of humility, we explore whether therapists can do anything to mitigate the damage.

There’s a troubling trend toward viewing people who differ from us politically not just as uninformed or misguided, but as ill-motivated and dangerous. Through an organization called Better Angels, a couples therapist and an intrepid group of other concerned citizens embark on a bus tour to see what they can learn about shifting the standoff between Red and Blue America.