Psychodynamically Informed Brain Stimulation: Building a Bridge from Brain to Mind

Since its inception, psychiatry has undergone several periods of radical identity transformation. Initially limited to psychotherapy alone, the advent of medications stimulated an era of biological psychiatry. For years, medications served as the mainstay of biological treatments, paralleled by a rise in treatment resistance. Brain stimulation therapies are psychiatry's newest arm of intervention and represent an area ripe for exploration. These techniques offer new hope to treatment-resistant patients, but in a manner often dissociated from psychoanalytic conceptualization and the practice of psychotherapy. There is growing interest in bridging this divide. In this article, we continue the efforts at interweaving what may seem to be disparate approaches through the topic of treatment resistance. This article aims to engage interventional psychiatrists in considering psychosocial dimensions of their treatments and to provide education for psychoanalytic clinicians on the history, mechanism of action, and applications of brain stimulation technologies.