She initially identified this dark force as her own dead mother but, in the course of grappling with childhood demons during therapy, she unearthed the real dybbuk - herself.

And Mr. Stone's empathetic view of his biographical subject - as a grandiose, self-destructive man battling childhood demons and sinking into substance abuse and paranoia - was well suited to the movies' current fascination with dysfunction.

Lennon and Ono were fresh from several months of Dr Arthur Janov's 'Primal Scream' therapy, and songs such as 'Mother' and 'Remember' find Lennon exorcising his childhood demons.

McCray's childhood demons were more than that; even death didn't free you from them, but rather enslaved your mind, your spirit, your soul, whatever it was called, to them forever in some other plane.

But with a willful perversity, she had only partially suppressed her empathy that day, daring the childhood demons to visit again.

And that gives Ms. Barr, who long ago exhausted the public's interest in her childhood demons and adult tantrums, a chance to retune her persona.

And besides, most of us are pretty familiar with the tenets of Freud these days, so Liza's rapidly successful therapy, which exorcises her childhood demons with the precision of an appendix removal, has even more of a show-bizzy simplicity than it did in 1941.

Her issue is insomnia: tortured, impacted childhood demons that require her to use the pills, pot and booze to get through the night.

Mr. Burton, 39, who grew up in Burbank, Calif., said the impetus for the book came from a desire to exorcise childhood demons, much as "Edward Scissorhands" provided a catharsis for his troubled teen-age years.

Carter has his own set of hallucinations, involving Cain's evil aphorisms ("The cat's in the bag, and the bag is in the river") and Carter's attempts to shake off very persistent childhood demons.