Adolescence is a crucial turning point in personality development. Sexuality is predominant and the desire to transgress arises as a need for self-assertion, autonomy, and value attribution in meaningful relationships with reference adults and peers. It can therefore be said that transgression constitutes a physiological fact in adolescence, provided that the adolescent acquires the ability to negotiate conflict. However, there may be cases of 'pseudo-transgression', presenting itself as an tendency to perverse relationships that hinders the adolescent's gradual progression towards maturity and binds him or her to the reiteration of an altered object relationship, in which the other becomes the (sometimes unaware) victim of a seductive game that aims to force him or her to be consumed into a relationship based on adoration.
The perverse personality (different from the antisocial personality) seems to be doomed to constantly experience painful feelings of loss, shame, and guilt precisely as a consequence of the failure caused by the intimacy with the object. The aptitude of opposing the emptiness of their existences with a capacity for eidetic, imaginative, proto-symbolic expression, may make them able to master a new language through which they can begin to speak of themselves in a more authentic way that is closer to their own affective experience. This language is very close to artistic expression in all its forms.