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Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) Reissued in paperback by Vintage in 1995. The evocatively-titled Remembering Satan is New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright's probing and compulsively readable account of the often outlandish claims of sex abuse leveled against Paul R. Ingram, an Olympia, Washington sheriff's deputy. Among other curiousities, Lawrence investigates why Ingram, once he had been accused, began to corroborate the claims by "recovering" memories of satanic rituals involving not only himself but other members of the Olympia police force. Ingram was eventually tried and convicted of molesting his two daughters on the basis of recovered memories that many have come to see as fictitious. Ingram, who was released from prison earlier this year after serving 15 years, was 43 years old when his 22-year old daughter, Ericka, first brought charges. Her younger sister followed with her own charges. Soon, the claims amplified from memories of abuse to memories of ritualistic satanic activities, involving the sacrifice of babies, attended by members of the community. Mr. Ingram's conciliatory response—he began to remember the incidents in therapy and through shamanistic prayer rituals —underscored the weirdness of the whole affair, especially after a social psychologist brought in by the prosecution to question Ingram concluded that he was probably not guilty of anything, except being highly suggestible to trances and having a dangerous eagerness to please authorities. The Ingram case highlights the susceptibility of memory in general, the mechanics of victimhood, the amateurish, often dangerous culture of abuse specialists, the venal culture of Christian publishers out to make a buck, and the hysteria that can result from atavistic mass fears (such as satanic ritual). Wright knits these sometimes elsuive threads of the culture into a cogent story that is gripipng throughout. In addition to writing a compelling narrative, he uses particular chapters to analyze elements of contemporary American culture that would allow the tragedies portrayed in the book to occur. Psychiatrist Walter Reich wrote in the New York Times in 1994, "Given memory's indispensability and frailty, it's striking that so many of us are ready to play so fast and loose with it. When we uncritically embrace reports of recovered memories of sexual abuse, and when we nonchalantly assume that they must be as good as our ordinary memories, we debase the coinage of memory altogether. What we should do is shore up the legitimacy of an imperfect but precious human capacity—the capacity to attest to events that we have always remembered—by resisting the creation of a new category of memory whose products are so often mere inventions conjured by the ministrations of recovery specialists." It is difficult, after finishing Remembering Satan, to not make the same conclusion. MORE: Lawrence Wright's Homepage An Update on the Ingram Case A List of Books About Recovered Memory |
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