Oppression
His seminal work on oppression is as relevant today as it was throughout his life. As he had promised his fellow prisoners in the Soviet camp, their shared experience found their way into a book that became a classic. His Oppression: a study in social and criminal psychology, published in England in1954, continues to be reprinted (in 1973, 1998, 2001 and 2003) and referred to by experts in the field.
Inspired and informed by his `participant observation' in the Gulag, Oppression is a study of survivors of Nazi forced labour and concentration camps. Despite almost insurmountable difficulties, Grygier managed to conduct interviews and run personality and other tests on scientifically drawn samples of survivors of Nazi oppression. He carried out his research in the U.S. zone of Germany – in Displaced Persons’ Camps and in prisons that held displaced persons who committed offences after liberation. His goal was to examine the impact of oppression on the human mind and culture. He found that oppression tends to produce an extra-punitive attitude in the oppressed, diverting aggression to external persons and situations. His research confirmed his observation from the Gulag that oppressed people had a tendency to turn around and oppress someone else. Moreover, oppression also promoted attitudes favouring lawlessness and conflict. Based on his findings he also explored the relations between oppression, neurosis, delinquency and racial prejudice.
Personality tests
Grygier’s empirical study of oppression sharpened his interest in quantifying and verifying the psychoanalytical model of personality. He developed a personality test known as the Dynamic Personality Inventory (Grygier, 1962), based mainly on the Freudian model. It was used in several languages and even more countries and, eventually, developed a life of its own. His Likes and Interests Test (Grygier, 1960) was influenced by art, Norwegian theatre, French novels, Polish poems (including his own), and by many theories. He was working on his manuscript Personality Defined by Likes and Interests, Reality and Imagination, the Mind and the Heart till the very end of his life.