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At the time, Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process.
The imaginary was then the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined.
In this respect, 'imaginary' is not simply the opposite of 'real': the image certainly belongs to reality and Lacan sought in animal ehtology ethology facts that brought out formative effects comparable to that described in 'the mirror stage.'
The notion of the 'sympbolicsymbolic' came to the forefront in the Rome Report. The symbols referred to here are not icons, stylized figurations, but signififierssignifiers, in the sense developed by Saussure and Jakobson, extended into a generalized definition: differential elements, in themselves without meaning, which acquire value only in their mutual relations, and forming a closed order - the question is whther this order is or is not complete.
Henceforth it is the symbolic, not the imaginary, that is seen to be the determining order of the subject, and its effects are radical: the subject, in Lacan's sense, is himself an effect of the symbolic.
Levi-Strauss's formalization of the elementary structures of kinship and its use of Jakobson's binarism provided the basis for Lacan's conception of the symbolic - a conception, however, that goes well beyond its origins.
