Short answers, pulled from the story.
Juan Luis Vives (the 6th of March 1493 - the 6th of May 1540) was a Spanish Valencian Renaissance humanist scholar who is credited as the father of modern psychology. He was the first scholar to analyze the psyche directly, and he wrote the first Western tract proposing that states had a responsibility to provide financial relief for the urban poor.
Vives's mother Blanquina was investigated by the Inquisition in 1491 and acquitted, but she died of plague in 1508. Around 1524, his father, grandmother, and great-grandfather were convicted and executed for Crypto-Judaism. Around 1528, his mother's corpse was exhumed and burned at the stake based on her earlier testimony about observing Yom Kippur.
In his 1525 treatise De Subventione Pauperum Sive de Humanis Necessitatibus, Vives argued that the state had a responsibility to provide financial relief for the poor and craft training for the unskilled poor. It is considered the first tract of its kind in the Western world to treat urban poverty and propose concrete suggestions for state policy.
Vives was confined to his house for six weeks in 1528 after he openly sided with his patroness Catherine of Aragon and declared himself against the annulment of her marriage to Henry VIII. He had been living at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and acting as tutor to Princess Mary before the dispute cost him royal favour.
Vives conducted extensive interviews with people and documented the connections between their emotions, the words they used, and the subjects they discussed. He rejected determinism in human behavior, explored unconscious memory, and argued that understanding how the soul functions matters more than defining what the soul is. Gregory Zilboorg called him a godfather of psychoanalysis in his 1941 work A History of Medical Psychology.
Vives was born in Valencia and spent most of his adult life in the southern Habsburg Netherlands, residing in Bruges for the final years of his life. He also lived for a period in Thomas More's house in Chelsea, England, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He died in Bruges in 1540 and was buried at St. Donatian's Cathedral.