How to interpret self.append(...)?

In the video, the teacher has a line of code: self.append(...) My understanding is that self refers to an instance of the class, in this case Hand. Since Hand is inherited from List, Hand should have an attribute that is a List. The above line of code seems to append a new element to that List. But I'm wondering why the name of that List, say aList, is not used here, i.e., shouldn't it be self.aList.append(...)? The reason I'm asking is that in Hand class, one can include other attributes, including another list. If we don't include the list name, how does the computer know which attribute list to append to? Many thanks!