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The authors studied two hundred and forty men found to be sexually dangerous as defined by the Massachusetts Act of 1958, which allows a person so found to be incarcerated from one day to life under civil commitment. Rapists are classified by the authors according to the predominance of aggression or sexual aim present in the motivation. In the first group the primary aim is aggressive, and anger is displaced onto a woman who is a complete stranger. A striking number in this group had suffered a prepubertal or postpubertal trauma with an older woman, sometimes the mother or another relative. They tended to view women as either the ideal mother or the unfaithful prostitute, and to set up relationships with undependable women who sooner or later were unfaithful to them. Members of this group responded to treatment better than those in the other two groups.
The second group is characterized by activities that are predominantly sexual rather than aggressive. The typical history of the offender in this group includes a remote but not necessarily absent father and a repressive, controlling, and infantilizing mother. The mental life is replete with perverse, homosexual, and passive tendencies. The rape is committed both as a defense against passive wishes and, according to the authors, as an attempt to deny the feeling of being passive and impotent. These patients responded well to psychotherapy, but generally required long treatment. In the third group, characterized by sex aggression diffusion, the offenders seem not able to experience sexual pleasure without some degree of accompanying violence. These men are similar to the psychopathic character in experiencing no guilt, having no stable object relations, and in not having had a latency period. The history of members of this group usually includes a sadistic father and an excessively giving and forgiving mother. As distinct from the aggressive first group of rapists, the sadistic rapist needs violence for e