How much can we trust our memories?

The book Remembering Satan made my jaw drop literally, in which the author Lawrence Wright describes the bizarre case of Paul Ingram, a Washington State deputy sheriff, who was accused by his daughters of sexual abuse and of belonging to a satanic cult.

The stories started with Paul Ingram being arrested because of accusations from his daughters Ericka and Julie of sexual abuse. Followed by some unprofessional interrogations from his colleagues, Paul recovered several memories of molesting his daughters while in trance, implicating two fellow deputies participating in those raping and sexual abuses. At the same time, Paul's daughters produced new disturbing memories of participating satanic practices with their whole family and other members of the sheriff's department, which involved killing babies, raping women, and child cannibalism.

In the irrational and hysterical wave of "Satanic Panic", which resulted in numerous investigations/trials of people accused of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) in 1980s in the US, the case of Ingram was going craze. Because Paul Ingram originally plead guilty and recovered memories corresponding to his daughters' accusations. This case has been claimed to be the proof of the existence of SRA, although Ingram's recovered memories lacked evidence and consistency and almost no evidence of any SRA has ever been found.

To make the case more complex, psychologist Richard Ofshe did a little experiment to Paul Ingram, which he implanted a false memory to Ingram. Even after Ofshe told Ingram that the detailed memory Ingram recovered actually never happened, Ingram insisted that it felt so true to him. Based on this experiment, Ofshe claimed that Ingram was inadvertently hypnotized and the confessions were the result of false memories being implanted with suggestions by authority figures who conducted his interrogation.

As Freud abandoned his seduction theory and concluded that the memories of sexual abuse were in fact imaginary fantasies, while some psychologists have shown that it is possible to implant false memories in individuals, it is possible to doubt the validity of the recovered memories of sexual abuses of Paul Ingram, his daughters, and later his wife.

At the end of my reading, the truth behind the case of Paul Ingram becomes more blurring than ever. It even made me start doubting my own memories, especially those related to my childhood.

I have an memory of a vivid picture that our family were sending off my uncle to join the army. In that memory, I was on my mother's lap seeing that my uncle had his stuff packed on his back waving goodbye to us. When I was little, I claimed that I remembered that scene. I refused to admit it being false memory even my mother told me that is almost impossible because my uncle left the year when I was born.

Now, I realize that it is very much possible that I came up that memory based on some books I read or TV show I watched. That memory is likely my fantasy rather than a fact. Then, how much can we trust our own memories? How much differences between the facts and the memories?