A case is presented of a twenty-seven-year-old borderline schizophrenic man whose fascination with protruding navels prompted him to raise his own depressed navel periodically by one of two methods. He would attempt to raise the navel level by cutting away the periumbilical tissues or, more often, he would raise the skin from the navel fundus with a threaded needle and fashion a positive 'belly button' out of the pierced skin folds.

The psychodynamic speculations which accrued from the patient's analysis did not allow formulation of an unequivocally satisfactory clarification of the perverse activities. Kubie's tenet of an innate 'unconscious drive to become both sexes' emerged as the most plausible explanation.