fingarette's essay, "self-deception and the 'splitting of the ego'", proposes a model of self-deception that does not view it as based on holding inconsistent beliefs or as primarily a matter of belief. fingarette maintains that this model avoids the paradox inherent in seeing self-deception as involving making oneself believe something that one still does not believe. he compares his understanding of self-deception to freud's ideas. nagel's essay, "freud's anthropomorphism", discusses freud's views about the physical basis of mental phenomena such as perception, as well as experiences and desires. he explores the question of whether it is possible to understand the physical systems that underlie human psychology using the same language ordinarily used to describe human mental states without understanding the physical significance of those descriptions.