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omphalopsychic

omphalopsychic adjective: related to or characterised by navel-gazing (omphaloskepsis).

Adjective

omphalopsychic (not comparable)

  1. (uncommon) Related to or characterised by navel-gazing (omphaloskepsis).
    • The hypnotic method, he added, was used by the sculptors of antiquity to make their models hold still, by the “omphalopsychic” monks of Mount Athos staring at their navel, by Indian fakirs converging their eyes on the tip of their nose, […]1979, Francis Schiller, Paul Broca: Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer of the Brain, →ISBN, page 105
    • This also seems to suggest that Alcibiades was primarily in love with Socrates’ personality, his harmonious nature, which nevertheless fulfilled itself in a negative self-relation to the idea and an omphalopsychic staring at oneself.1992 [1841], Søren Kierkegaard, “The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates”, in Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, transl., The Concept of Irony […], →ISBN, page 50

Noun

omphalopsychic (plural omphalopsychics)

  1. (rare) Someone who engages in omphaloskepsis, a navel-gazer.
    • In many convents of the Greek Church it has been practised since the eleventh century, as it is still by the Omphalopsychics, with whom hypnotic reverie is obtained by steadily gazing at the umbilicus.1892 January, Ernest Hart, “Hypnotism and Humbug”, in The Nineteenth Century, volume 31, number 179, page 24
    • Watts seems to say that man must turn in on himself in an involuntary act of introversion, when mind would contemplate self in a universe of his own creating (an omphalopsychic).1948, Lionel Goitein, Art and the Unconscious

Forms of omphalopsychic

pluralomphalopsychics

Origin of omphalopsychic

Back-formation from omphalopsychite: see there for more. By surface analysis, omphalo- + psych- + -ic.

Questions about omphalopsychic

What does omphalopsychic mean?
Omphalopsychic means related to or characterised by navel-gazing (omphaloskepsis).
What part of speech is omphalopsychic?
Omphalopsychic can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near omphalopsychic in the dictionary

  1. omphalomesenteric
  2. omphalopagi
  3. omphalopagus
  4. omphalophlebitis
  5. omphalophobia
  6. omphalopsychic
  7. omphalopsychics
  8. omphalopsychite
  9. omphalopsychites
  10. omphaloptic
  11. omphalos

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: omphalopsychic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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