“I would guess there are few theses that answer such a fundamental question and provide such an explanation,” Holbrook said of Stuart’s work.

“She answers things at a mechanistic level, and I expect to see this published in a top journal.”

Rosen, a history and science concentrator in Pforzheimer House, said that with her thesis, “I tried to show the ways our ideas about self, knowledge and memory are much more assumptions than universal truths.”

Her thesis examined the work of turn-of-the-century Harvard psychotherapist Morton Prince, and his famous “Beauchamp case,” a study of multiple personality disorder.

Rosen compared Prince’s model of the mind to that of Sigmund Freud.

“Prince’s model was a more open model than Freud’s,” Rosen said. “I call it ‘breadth psychology,’ which is a phrase I made up to oppose it to ‘depth psychology,’ which Freud was using.”

For her research, Rosen said she poured over Prince’s papers, and considered the origins and legacy of his work. She connected Prince’s ideas to those of modern philosophical and literary theorists.

Rosen said she will enter the Humanities and Medical program next year at Mt. Sinai University, where she will begin training for a degree as a psychiatrist.

“I’m excited to be able to return to the subject down the line,” she said. “When I can apply my own experience in the field.”

—Staff writer Elizabeth S. Widdicombe can be reached at widdicom@fas.harvard.edu.