It is May 7, 1982, shortly after 3.30pm. Ali Magoudi, a Parisian psychoanalyst, paces back and forth awaiting the secret arrival of his next patient — whose identity, if revealed, would set off an earthquake in French politics.

The figure who enters, 45 minutes late, is François Mitterrand, no less — the president of France. Magoudi discovers that his patient does not want to talk about his childhood or his dreams, but about Margaret Thatcher and the crisis over the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands.

“Excuse me,” Mitterrand begins, apologising for his late arrival. “I had a difference of opinion to settle with the Iron Lady. What an impossible woman, that Thatcher! “With her four nuclear submarines on mission in the southern Atlantic, she threatens to launch the atomic weapon against Argentina — unless I supply her with the secret codes that render deaf and blind the missiles we have sold to the Argentinians. Margaret has given me very precise instructions on the telephone.”

The scene is the most striking in Magoudi’s book, Rendez-vous: The psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, which is to be published in France on Friday. An account of their meetings, which spanned 11 years from 1982 to 1993, it is by far the most revealing of a flurry of books preceding the 10th anniversary of Mitterrand’s death on January 8, 1996.

The psychoanalyst has assured his publisher that all the quotes attributed to Mitterrand are genuine, although he cannot vouch for the truth of what the president said.

Magoudi never fathoms Mitterrand out enough to draw up a psychological profile. But in notes taken after their meetings, he writes of his patient’s near-mystical enjoyment of power, his paranoid tendencies, his “massive anxiety” and the way morbid images frequently crop up in his speech.

The French are still fascinated by the socialist leader who ruled France for 14 years, and who so cultivated an aura of mystery he was nicknamed “le Sphinx”. Although he claimed to have brought morality into French politics, his legacy has been clouded by corruption scandals. Last month, seven of his former associates were convicted of invasion of privacy for their role in a phone-tapping operation that he orchestrated on spurious national security grounds.

Imagine a Tony Blair, a George W Bush or a Vladimir Putin confiding to a psychoanalyst long-buried childhood memories; glimpses of his private life involving an estranged wife, a mistress and an illegitimate daughter; fears of illness and death; and the occasional state secret or state lie.

Magoudi says his book was ordered by Mitterrand himself, who knew he would not live to see it published. It is a bizarre, intimate and haunting testament. Above all, it throws a new light on the help Mitterrand gave to Thatcher — who, he famously said, “had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”.

IT WAS in early May 1982, after a year in power, that Mitterrand contacted Magoudi to ask him to become his therapist. The psychoanalyst accepted with reluctance: he didn’t relish the prospect of the secret service searching his study in the Marais district or curious courtiers bugging his telephone.

The next day, on May 4, two French-manufactured Super Etendard planes of the Argentine airforce attacked HMS Sheffield, a destroyer in the British taskforce steaming to the Falkland islands.

A wave-skimming Exocet missile hit the Sheffield amidships, killing 20 crew and injuring 24. The destroyer was scuttled and British naval commanders swiftly concluded that this French-made weapon was so effective that the entire operation to throw the Argentine occupiers out of the islands was at risk.

Mitterrand had already pledged co-operation to Thatcher. Jacques Attali, his former aide, wrote that the president called her on the day after the invasion and told her: “I am with you.”