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Today's local paper carries a big headline: When Rehabilitation Fails. This disturbing headline is followed by two pages of discussion of a murder which took place at the W. J. Maxey Training School. The alleged killer, a 19-year-old man, had been admitted to the juvenile equivalent of a maximum-security prison two years before, after being tried as an adult and found guilty of a knife-point rape of a 36-year-old woman in Detroit. The school handles the young men in groups, trying to motivate the group to lend support to the effort, on the part of the inmates, to suppress the memories of their own previous victimisation, and to support each other in learning to control their aggression. In fact, last summer, when another 'disturbed student' had attacked a teacher, and held a 'sharpened point of a wooden ruler' to her throat, the present offender had been the leader of the expected response—where the whole group grabbed the attacker, and held him down until he calmed down and surrendered. This time, however, he escaped the usual supervision twice on the same day: on the first occasion stealing the key to the social-workers' lounge, and on the second entering the lounge where he allegedly killed, by strangulation, Barbara Synnestvedt, a 46-year-old counsellor.
This incident illustrates the difficulties we have in working out a comprehensive view of the principles both of sheer aggression and of sadistic sexual attacks. For, while most murder cases involve a known person, some murders, rapes, and even relations with prostitutes, depend on the 'strangeness' of the victim—actually a disidentification with the object.
From a psychological point of view, it is more likely that we will gain useful insights from studying the great majority of homicides and various sadistic acts, which are committed on known objects, and the author decides to take this tack. He does make one early point, which we need to keep in mind for a number of reasons: that adult murders involve