“As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name,” Dr. Hefez said. “He’s penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man — he’s like a reflection of us in the mirror.”

The French project themselves onto Mr. Sarkozy, too, Dr. Hefez said.

“He’s the incarnation of the postmodern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic,” the psychiatrist said. “And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme, that it’s the individual who counts, not the society.”

A year after taking office, Mr. Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere, at least in the world of television and print. The daily newspaper Le Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, his life and loves, with more than a million sold, for $25.1 million.

Some of the titles display the fury and fascination that Mr. Sarkozy has stimulated: “The King is Naked”; “The Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Pretend”; “The Liquidator”; “He Must Go!”; “The Duty of Insolence”; and “Somersaults and Flips at the Élysée.”

Dr. Hefez analyzed this obsession in an article and then in his own book, “Obsessive Sarkosis,” in which he identifies related illnesses, like Sarkophrenia and Sarkonoia.

Last month, the magazine Paris Match ran a cartoon by Jean-Jacques Sempé showing a woman talking to a psychiatrist, saying: “I’m very worried. Sunday, at the Louvre, I asked a guard where to find the room of Egyptian Sarkozycophagi. At dinner with a musicologist, I said twice that my favorite opera is ‘Sarkozy Fan Tutte.’ I’d like to know if this is serious and how to cure it.”

Television covers Mr. Sarkozy’s every gesture, in both homage and mockery, itself an effort to create distance from the phenomenon that it perpetuates and magnifies. It is all part of what the French have come to call the “pipolisation” of political life, a term, presumably derived from People magazine, that refers to the idolatry of celebrities and soap opera. Dr. Hefez considers the trend an example of “democracy turning against itself, as Tocqueville foresaw.”