thalberg's essay, "freud's anatomies of the self", discusses freud's explanations of both normal and disturbed forms of behavior in terms of a conflict of forces within a person. thalberg describes freud's explanations as ingenious and suggestive, but questions their coherence. in his view, while it was reasonable for freud to propose such explanations, they nevertheless resulted in conceptual confusion. pears's essay, "motivated irrationality, freudian theory and cognitive dissonance", discusses freud's explanations of errors such as forgetting and misreading, contrasting freud's views of such "motivated irrationality" with theories put forward by philosophers. pears criticizes sartre's discussion of freud, describing his critique of freud's theories as complex but "not very precisely formulated" and open to several different interpretations, as well as various potential objections. davidson's essay, "paradoxes of irrationality", based on a 1978 lecture, discusses what it means for an action, belief, intention, inference or emotion to be irrational. davidson argues that irrationality represents a failure of rationality rather than the absence of a capacity for rationality, and that a satisfactory account of irrationality must draw on freud's ideas.