Elena Gigante holds a PhD and is an IAAP-trained Jungian analyst practicing in Lecce. She is an ordinary member of the Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica (CIPA, Rome). Her path to depth psychology was neither straight nor predictable — it began with a childhood curiosity about the hidden workings of things, sharpened by an early experience of standing between two worlds: a small village in the South of Italy and the upper-class environment of a school in a nearby town. That persistent sense of estrangement, which she describes as a constant companion — sometimes boring, other times deeply stimulating — became less a wound than a precision instrument. Music, which she has practised since the age of five, became the thread connecting a doctoral training in neuroscience with an interior life that neuroscience alone could never fully contain. She came to understand the neural sciences as a way of studying the “hardware” through which human beings experience the world, while recognising that what runs on that hardware — psyche, symbol, sound — required an entirely different vocabulary.

In the consulting room, that double fluency shapes a particular kind of attention. Gigante listens not only to what a patient says but to the body that says it, working with something close to a phenomenological attitude — catching what posture and silence communicate while the words are moving in another direction. For her, psyche and body cannot truly be separated, and analytical work that reduces human experience to a single dimension is already distorting it. She is careful, too, about the projections that a Jungian affiliation can attract — she admits to feeling a degree of apprehension when someone arrives having already idealised Jung, recognising that a full cast of characters can enter the room before the relationship has properly begun.

Most of the people who find Gigante do so, as she puts it, almost by chance — or perhaps by synchronicity. They tend not to arrive fluent in theoretical distinctions between orientations; they arrive with complexity, suffering, and contradiction, searching for a place where those things can be held without being collapsed prematurely into a label or a diagnosis. What they can expect in the first sessions, Gigante says simply, is sincere listening. They will also share the room with Flo, her dog, whom she describes as perhaps the most sensitive supervisor she has ever encountered — a detail that says something true about how she understands the therapeutic space: as something alive, relational, and irreducible to technique.