Carla on the Couch

Hannibal Hanschke / Reuters After finding out she's a love child, Madame Sarkozy has been working out some big issues in therapy. Eric Pape on the documentary France can't wait to see.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy doesn’t like to open herself up while she’s lying down—at least not when she’s in therapy.

That’s one of the things that France’s first lady reveals in the television documentary La Première Séance (The First Session). In a country where therapy retains a stigma in some circles, an array of writers, filmmakers, celebrities, and normal people share their feelings about their first visits to the therapist’s office. The film is sure to garner plenty of attention—especially for Bruni.

The experience, as she described it, was akin to love at first sight. “It has to do,” she says in excerpted quotes, “with the beating heart” of two people who meet.

The public fascination with Bruni runs the gamut, from her supposed fashion faceoffs with Michelle Obama or Spain’s Princess Letizia to her popular Web site focusing on her altruistic and artistic endeavors. It includes reports on old nude photos of her (either stolen or again on the auction block) and her ranking on the latest list of Paris’ most stylish ladies (she’s just fifth out of 10 famous nominees). But one thing is clear: Bruni is a magnet for attention like no first lady before her.

When the documentary airs on Nov. 7, viewers will seek hints about the inner struggles of the Italian heiress-turned-supermodel-turned-pop star-turned French first lady. In fact, the documentary offers just a few—she found her first time on the couch “vaguely boring” and recently switched to sitting face to face with her therapist because it allows her to “speak more freely.” It was only when she found a more suitable therapist that, on an initial visit, she sensed something “incandescent,” spurring her finally to invest herself fully in psychoanalysis. The experience, as she described it, was akin to love at first sight. “It has to do,” she says in excerpted quotes, “with the beating heart” of two people who meet.

Since then, the 41-year-old Bruni, who resisted analysis until she was 28, has spent a total of eight years in therapy. What suddenly drove Bruni into therapy 13 years ago, back when she was still a huntress of men, inspired by the writings of sexual revolutionaries like Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan? She has said she started therapy to prepare her for the next stages of her life and to overcome her “narcissism.”

• Gallery: The Art of Carla Bruni

• Eric Pape: Does Carla Wear Out Sarkozy? It turns out that she dived into therapy after she learned the family secret. While her very wealthy parents were often too busy to be very present in her life—she was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and then she began modeling to become independent as soon as possible—their complex relationship planted a profound unease in her, even if, for most of her life, she didn’t understand why. But when Alberto Bruni Tedeschi was dying in the mid-1990s, he finally revealed the truth: He wasn’t her real father.

Maurizio Remmert, the very young scion of another prominent rich Milanese family, was a classical guitarist who played with Carla’s pianist mother, it turned out, in more ways than one. Carla was the fruit of their six-year affair that ended around the time of her birth. Discovering the truth “was not a shock, and that is how I knew it was true, because I felt calm when [Alberto] told me that,” Carla told Vanity Fair. “I think lies are toxic for children, much more than a bad truth. Sometimes lies, when you are growing up, make you walk in a funny way to adapt.” Carla, free of the devoutly Catholic upbringing that prevented her parents from even contemplating divorce and after years of therapy, said that everything having to do with denial is “sick,” adding: “My own childhood reflects that.”

A preoccupied father and an entirely absent biological father surely go a long way toward explaining Bruni’s wide array of relationships with established daddy-aged men, whether in music, film, or politics. Her parents’ affairs, including her mother’s with a colleague, offered a model for the recurrent blurring of lines within and between her professional and personal worlds. She called on one ex-lover to produce her first CD and another to direct the videos. Things blurred in many other ways, too. At 21, she began dating Eric Clapton, who was more than twice her age; he turned out to be a stepping stone to an even more successful rock star friend of his, Mick Jagger, who was married to former model Jerry Hall.