Then there is the theory itself.
And the answer has to be Freudianism — the theory itself and its post-clinical afterlife.
Part of the reason for this response, Nuland points out, was that the theory itself was unsettling.
Higgs plays down his role in developing the idea, but there is no dismissing the importance of the theory itself.
With so much fuzziness, it is difficult to know whether the theory itself has a good track record or just the particular interpretation of it.
Arthur Laffer's famous curve drawn on a cocktail napkin offers some economists a nice shorthand guide to his supply-side idea, but it is not the theory itself.
Most critics, when they assemble their personal canons, will implicitly follow the director-centric impulses of the auteur theory, even if they retain some skepticism about the theory itself.
More than 80 years after the biology teacher John Scopes was tried on charges of illegally teaching evolution in Tennessee, the controversy here has played out with more subtlety, involving political code words and efforts to undermine the theory itself.
And the theory itself seems both obvious and dubious when applied to New York in the late 1990's (when the film, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, takes place).
Although the theory itself proved to be incorrect, the implication that laboratory and clinical observations together could demonstrate the physiological basis of a complex neural integration mechanism for pain perception inspired and challenged a young generation of researchers.
When new evidence conflicts with a reigning theory, scientists face a choice: they may throw out the theory itself (say, that the sun goes round the earth) or they may reject one or more of the background assumptions which, along with the theory, they need to make experimental predictions.
