Wreaking Revenge : Getting your own back can be very cathartic for the wronged, psychologists say. Just don’t get carried away and wind up in jail.

James Joseph Welsh of Eureka sent his ex-wife, who had asked him for help with a computer glitch, a viral-infested piece of software that wiped out her entire disk, leaving a taunting, hateful limerick burning on her screen.

* Frank Ronan of England stabbed, dismembered and shredded the beloved childhood teddy bear of his abusive lover, taking the head to ensure that the thing could never be mended.

* A woman who shall remain nameless was hit while driving around Washington, D.C., by a man who refused to stop and exchange insurance information. She followed him until he parked his Mercedes-Benz on a hill. Then she released the car’s parking brake and watched it slam into a tree.

* Audiences watching the film “Waiting to Exhale” shriek with satisfaction as one of the characters torches her jerk of a husband’s BMW with all of his impeccable designer suits in it.

The urge for revenge has existed since primitive man. But today, in the face of uncaring institutions, corporate downsizing and overburdened police and courts, do-it-yourself “justice” is more popular than ever.

While revenge has inspired plenty of violent, even fatal, episodes, experts say a nonviolent, restrained vengeance can satisfy the aggrieved without breaking any laws--or bones.

“It is psychologically healthy to find a way to express what you feel when treated unfairly or when treated with a lack of respect,” says Jeffrey Smalldon, a clinical psychologist in Ohio. “I would encourage a person to find a constructive vehicle for expressing their feelings.”

Constructive strategies for revenge could include achieving success in a career, a sport or some other endeavor to prove naysayers wrong. Or writing a no-holds-barred memo laying out your anger in exquisite detail--and then shredding it. Or embarrassing your nemesis with just the right acerbic line in just the right time and place.

It’s important to look at the situation from a problem-solving point of view rather than just blowing off emotional steam in a way that could soon leave you feeling foolish (or facing criminal charges). The popular misconception of Freudian catharsis--pounding a punching bag, say--does not relieve aggression but breeds it, say psychologists.

“There are some times when you could pay someone back, but you should do it in the cold light of logic, not when you are hot under the collar,” says Robert Baron, a social psychologist at Rensselaer Polytech in New York. “If you ask someone for a favor and they turn you down, you may want to respond in kind when they ask you for a favor. But revenge is a real dangerous path, because you want to give back more pain than you receive. Aggression is usually known to spiral upward.”

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Social psychologists say vengeance is the modus operandi of the impotent, fomented by roiling feelings of victimization and helplessness. A 1992 study found that those most likely to engage in vengeful behavior are hostile, introverted, ruminative and tend to dwell on slights.

But whether it is felt by jilted lovers, “out-placed” employees, harassed neighbors or embittered ex-spouses, the fundamental human need to see the world ordered by balance and justice fuels the desire to get one’s own back.

“We all have this visceral, guttural reaction that the person who breaks the rules must pay,” says Robert Folger of Tulane University, who has studied aggression and workplace violence, currently the most visible form of revenge.

“Driving the desire for revenge is the offender acting as if they are above the law, showing no remorse that they did something wrong, much less making up for it. People are much more anxious to exact their token of revenge when the other person acts as if what they have done has not bothered them in any way.”

Folger and other social scientists say revenge appears to be on the rise. The joys of payback are celebrated in two recent books, “Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even,” (Harmony Books, 1995) written by Regina Barreca and “Sweet Revenge: 200 Delicious Ways to Get Your Own Back” (Headline, 1995) written by Belinda Hadden and Amanda Christie.

And in New York City, where vengeance is a popular sport, a class called “How to Get Even Within the Law” has been taught for more than a year. It offers tips on inflicting pain without shooting yourself in the foot.

“Revenge as a popular tool to resolve human conflict has reemerged from primitive time as a rescission of the social contract,” says Rex Julian Beaber, a Los Angeles psychologist and lawyer. “In the eyes of most people, the state has failed. Civil justice--governed by rules that have become so arcane and technical that who wins has nothing to do with the crime--is expensive, inefficient and totally unpredictable. Likewise for criminal justice. This explains things as horrendous as the blowing up of the federal building in Oklahoma. Even in a perfect world order, revenge would never leave the scene because feelings of impotence and victimization will always exist.”

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Although revenge-seeking seems to be on the rise, author Barreca, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, says it’s still one of the last taboos.

“We are still supposed to be too nice to do this, but it is moving from being a victim to feeling that you can do something back,” she says.

Barreca says men and women have different styles of vengeance. Female revenge is more sly (like making dog food pa^te for an offending spouse as Kathleen Turner’s character did in “War of the Roses”). Male revenge is more often openly physical.

“Women are more cunning because they are more marginalized and voiceless than men,” she says. “One of my favorite stories is about a wife who put her husband through law school and the day after he graduated, he married Bambi. The wife went quietly but she sewed tiny shrimps in the hems of the curtains throughout the house and the entire place stank. They couldn’t figure out what it was. They cleaned the septic tank, the carpet and they finally moved--but they took the curtains with them.”

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Negative or “bad” revenge, Barreca says, is irrevocable and backfires.

Just ask Welsh, who sent that kamikaze software to his ex-wife. A Superior Court judge ended up sentencing him to four months in county jail for three felony counts of introducing a computer contaminant. Welsh was also ordered to pay $12,000 in restitution and spend 300 hours teaching computer courses to high school students.

But sometimes, Barreca says, even vengeful intentions can produce positive outcomes.

“This woman wasn’t going to get promoted because her company didn’t promote women to those type of jobs. A 27-year-old man was lined up to get it. So she [made public] confidential files about salaries so women employees could see how much less they were making than their male counterparts. It resulted in a class-action suit.”

Instructing people in the tenets of the revenge catharsis is Philip Seldon, who teaches the New York learning annex class on payback. Seldon sees revenge as the natural order of things.

“I have had a lot of people mistreat me in my life and I have seen a lot of people go through a lot of anguish,” says Seldon, rattling off his own personal tales of revenge at a head-spinning pace, punctuated by gleeful chuckles. “I thought they could benefit from learning to how to get justice.

“If someone insults you, you can’t have them arrested or sued. But you can say to someone at a party who is snide to you: ‘That is a very pretty dress you are wearing. Do they make it in your size?’

“I teach in my course that you should forgive and forget,” says Seldon, who claims to have orchestrated revenge on his childhood bully by having the man publicly humiliated on the “Maury Povich Show.” “If that doesn’t work, then they concoct a plan, biding their time so they don’t act compulsively, get obsessed and do things that are illegal.”

Seldon says sometimes just fantasizing a revenge scenario offers enough of a catharsis that a person doesn’t need to enact it.

Still, plenty of folks passing through his three-hour class see their fantasies through. For example:

* A man who lost a promotion because of a false report in his personnel file turned in his boss for embezzlement.

* A woman whose date stood her up on New Year’s Eve (he reportedly told her it was because she was ugly) enlisted a friend to romance the man, standing him up for expensive engagements, ordering the most expensive meals, and last week, as the coup de grace, standing him up on New Year’s Eve.

* A woman romanced by her dancing school instructor discovered that he was giving her jewelry he stole from other women and stealing her jewelry to give to them. She reported his misdeeds to the dance community, and his career crashed and burned.

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With no signs of a reversal of the revenge boom in sight, Ronan, whose testimonial about the teddy bear murder was published in the British newspaper the Observer, offers insights. Ronan claimed to be so damaged by his lover, both physically and emotionally, that he had pondered suicide. By shredding his lover’s threadbare teddy (apparently he slept with it nightly) Ronan found a redemption of sorts.

“By a lucky accident I achieved the perfect revenge,” he wrote. “The object I destroyed was inanimate and of no value to anyone but the owner, but in some way I paid him a small measure of the pain he had so liberally dealt out to me. . . .

“I broke a pact in which I had agreed to be good and suffer and take the blame for loving someone who hated himself. . . . With one melodramatic and symbolic but effective bound, I was free.”

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It’s Payback Time

Some popular tactics for revenge are against the law, and for good reason. But others can bring nearly as much satisfaction without landing your nemesis in the hospital--or you in jail.

Some to avoid:

* Making annoying phone calls may be aggravated harassment.

* Squirting glue into someone’s locks counts as vandalism or criminal mischief.

* Sending mystery pizzas to an unsuspecting recipient is a form of fraud.

* Putting someone’s name on a mailing list for pornographic material may violate postal laws--and they might actually enjoy the subscription.

* Slashing a partner’s cherished Armani suits would be vandalism or criminal mischief. Instead, try sending them across town to be cleaned and telling the dry cleaner there is no rush.

Better approaches, experts say, might include:

* Plant bulbs in a pattern designed to send a message to your rude neighbor, or cut your topiary into a symbolic gesture.

* Obnoxious neighbors throwing a big party? Hang all your dainties out on the clothing line.

* Getting harassing phone calls? Tell the caller in great detail about your day. (“First I flossed and then I clipped my toenails, but I had this infected hangnail. . . .”)

* If a clerk is rude and tries to rush you into buying something, leave the store temporarily and return to buy the merchandise from another clerk.

* If two men are hitting on you, call one up and tell him you are finally ready for him, and give him the other guy’s address.

Sources: Philip Seldon, instructor of “How to Get Even Within the Bounds of the Law,” a class offered through New York City learning annex; Regina Barreca, author of “Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even,” and authors Belinda Hadden and Amanda Christie, “Sweet Revenge: 200 Delicious Ways of Getting Your Own Back.”