2020年上海（春考） Passage A

When I was in high school, I wanted to attend an Ivy League university on the East Coast. I had the grades and SAT scores to get into Harvard but my father refused to pay even though tuition back then was much more affordable than it is today, well within the means of our family. I went to UCLA instead, a good university but not an Ivy. I worked at least 20 hours per week throughout my four years and have always felt that I missed out on a lot of college. I feel that I didn’t have enough time to devote to my studies. One of my biggest regrets is not having had the kind of immersion experience that my oldest son enjoyed. I envy him, but it’s not a bitter feeling. It doesn’t make me lose sight of my own accomplishments and the very real goodness in my life so far.

I believe my own father envied me, too. Early in high school, he had to drop out and help support his family during the Depression. Although he never said as much, I know he wished he could have finished high school and gone on to higher education. I was the only one of his children to do so. When I earned my doctorate and built a life as a professional, he felt a mixture of pride, vicarious fulfillment and envy.

I graduated first in my high school class. Years later, I learned that for months after, Dad had carried the little slip announcing my class rank in his pocket, showing it to friends and business associates. He was obviously proud, though he never told me so. It strikes me as a narcissistic sort of pride, about him rather than me. Many of you will relate to this experience. In your comments to my posts, you’ve told me about parents who exploited you for narcissistic gain. I don’t think my father was a bad man, or that his experience of pride was particularly unusual. Don’t most parents like to brag about their child’s success because it reflects well upon them? When I speak of my sons’ lives, I feel pride in them as well as myself.

Envy gets a bad rap but there’s nothing unusual about it. Envy, as I’ve said before, can teach you what you want. Problems only arise when it links up with shame, as I’ve written about before. When the success/beauty/youth enjoyed by someone else makes us feel like a loser in comparison, our envy may become poisonous. In the illogical unconscious, we may feel as if it is precisely because the other person has the trait or thing we want that we cannot have it. We may feel that the only possible relief would be to destroy the object of our envy.