Phallic imagery.
The human mind in early childhood is attempting to justify the phenomenal world to the world the brain is biogenetically designed to understand. This includes the phallic category. Lacan's ideas about phallic imagery are polarizing, but basically, Lacan maintains the Freudian attitude that somehow having a penis informs a child's sense of self as it comes to understand gender roles in its family.
Dreams and symbols.
Jung is thought of as the authority of this, but Lacan was also incredibly influential. Basically, there is a relationship between the images of serious, emotional dreams and early childhood experience. That does not mean that Lacan believes dreams are memories of actual events, but rather, that the dreams are evoking deep-seeded emotions that might have arrived from critical moments of brain development in early childhood. For instance, a child who grows up fearful of loud yelling might have dreams as an adult that show an aversion to over-stimulation.
Relationship between subjective experience and objective reality.
For Lacan, imagery and symbolism is part and parcel of our brains trying to justify the existence of the mind to the objective reality we perceive around us. That means that our minds are primarily a collection of images and associations, and that we build on those first understandings like schemas. So anything could be conceived as an interpretable image or metaphor. Any image in a dream might be attached to a meaningful emotional experience, attempting to express itself in a mind that is built on image-word associations. Here is the part of Lacan's philosophy that leans toward a linguistic approach to perception.
The imagery of the mirror.
The image of the mirror is central to understanding Lacan's methodology. When a child views a mirror, they are confronted with their literal, physical reality. More importantly, this self-perception causes the creation of the ego, which is simply the image associated with the self in the mind, and from that image, we govern ourselves as adults.
Fetishism.
Fetishes are objects of religious devotion, but in psychology, they refer to the emotional and sexual fascination with objects of a certain kind of devotion or obsession. These images are commonly associated with early childhood obsessions, such as the temptation to put something in one's mouth and suck, attached to the early childhood habit of being breast-fed, or the temptation of but something around ones anus, related to the early childhood fascination with pooping and being wiped by an adult. The emotional trials of adult existence are believed by Lacan to call to attention other object-relationships that have felt similar in the past, and this might be at the root of sexual fetishism in adult life.
