PERSPECTIVE ON THE SIMPSON CASE : We Gauge Our Inner Struggles and Hope We’re Different : Part of our fascination with the media frenzy is voyeurism, but part is a catharsis of our own potential for violence.

I went by O.J. Simpson’s house to watch the “tabloid mania.” What a zoo. What a travesty of human dignity. What a violation of privacy. What an intrusion on personal suffering. What a voyeuristic, prurient feeding frenzy.

So why did I do it, and why did I stay glued to the television Friday night during that long, bizarre chase? Is being a voyeur of the voyeurs any less voyeuristic? I like to see myself as above prurience and in control of my more base instincts. But the truth is that I am drawn to such tabloid scenes, as are so many millions of us, to get some vicarious excitement and for something more important. Voyeurism helps us cope as much as it excites us. It does this in a two-step fashion. First we make an emotional connection to the event to experience a vicarious catharsis and relief. Then we find a way to disclaim our connection to the experience in order to reassure ourselves that it won’t happen to us.

Most of these dramas have horrifying and terrifying components. Most of us have known horror and terror in our own lives and have usually endured it alone. But when we and others are now drawn to the same scene, we all get to feel vulnerability together. And as the aloneness lessens, we feel relieved. Remember how we felt such catharsis and camaraderie after the riots, fires and earthquakes?

In the Simpson case, our identification is with our own fear of losing control or becoming vulnerable to another who might lose control. We become frighteningly aware of our potential to explode when the pressures from the outside world, from inside our families and inside our minds, override all of our control mechanisms. The agitation builds and compels us to precipitous action that defies judgment and ignores consequences.

When I’ve asked most men I know who initiated a divorce, “What was the last straw?” they may mention incompatibility of values, poor communication or even not enough sex. But finally, what it comes down to for many men is feeling the possibility of violence toward someone they were pledged to protect from harm. When a man feels cornered from all sides and there is no outlet, his choices seem simple: go crazy, kill the offending agents or kill yourself. In the most tragic cases we see all three. After murder relieves an unbearable Angst, the anger subsides. The killer then sees clearly what he has done, and can’t live with; then the only choice is often to kill oneself.

One of the ways we cope with these demons inside us is to be voyeuristically drawn to inhuman acts of humans toward each other. We are able to identify with the victim, the victimizer, the rage and the outrage without it happening to us directly. It’s like going to a bloody movie where we are drawn to the violence for cathartic identification and then feel the relief that it was just make-believe.

We also look for some disclaimer to reassure ourselves that we are not the same as the participants. We’ll look for alcohol if we are not drinkers, for guns if we don’t own one, for a mixed marriage, for a different ethnic background, for divorce if we are married, for marriage if we are divorced, for a violent location like Los Angeles if we live in some other part of the country or some other explanation to reassure ourselves that we are sufficiently unlike these people to have it happen to us.

But the more someone could be like us, or as in this case, someone we want to be, the less we are able to disclaim our similarity, the more compelling and disturbing it becomes. A friend of victim Ron Goldman expressed it when he said he couldn’t comprehend how his childhood hero could be suspected of killing his best friend. Because voyeurism fails when we can’t distance and reassure ourselves, people resorted to denial, cheering his freeway flight like he was an underdog hero running for the goal line.

Women are immune to this sort of voyeurism, though it is usually directed differently. Many mothers are riveted to stories about child abuse because they know inside how close they feel they are to abusing when a child won’t stop crying or nagging or misbehaving. Women also want to feel that identification and that relief from aloneness when they are struggling with impulses that threaten to overwhelm them. So they eagerly read these tabloid stories to identify, relate, resonate and then find a disclaimer to reassure themselves. “Oh, that mother was poor (or newly immigrant or abused). That’s not me. I won’t act on it. I’m safe. My children are safe.”

In truth, none of us is in as much danger as we fear, but none of us is as safe as we’d like.

The real answer is in confronting the bad situations in our lives and finding resolution. But for many of us, coping through voyeurism can offer temporary relief through cathartic identification and reassurance that since we’re different, it won’t happen to us.