Rapidly developing, non-invasive, neuroimaging methods provide increasingly detailed structural and functional information about the nervous system, helping advance our understanding of pain processing, chronic pain conditions, and the mechanisms of analgesia. However, effective treatment for many chronic pain conditions remains a large, unmet medical need. In this review, we examine how the neuroimaging of pain has enhanced our understanding of the mechanisms of chronic pain, our current understanding of the central neural correlates of pharmacologic modulation of pain, and the role of neuroimaging in analgesic development, discussing both current limitations and future directions