Select with Regular Expressions

Hi,

testing a program I ran into a glitch working with the ~* statement.
The problem is, that whenever I want to query something from the 
database with ~* containing brackets () or a question mark psql throws 
an exception.
So far I have tried to escape the sequence but then I ran into another 
problem. Psql didn't fetch the result I wanted it to fetch (the one with 
the brackets or question mark),
but one that was similiar to the one I wanted it to fetch.
Here's an example:
I want to fetch 'my (search) string' from the table

select bar from table where bar ~*' my (search) string';

This didn't work out so I tried:

select bar from table where bar~*'my \(search\) string';

But this only returned:

'my search string'

and not the wanted result 'my (search) string'.
The problem is, that I have to escape ... the string otherwise my 
program throws an exception.

The language is python.

Thanx in advance

Lucius