I mean there is always value in trying to improve mental states. I think in its humanitarian ideal psychology is good stuff, and has saved lives and ideally can save even more.
Similarly math gives us incredible predictive power but when people think everything about reality is amenable to mathematical description we end up with (IMO) deeply wrongheaded ideas like causation is either deterministic/random b/c math only has non-random and random descriptions through functions, prob-stats, etc.
I was thinking about this the other night, because I was out playing a game and the topic of "useless" psychology degrees came up. That is, I have one and so did another guy. I say "useless" because we simply never actually did anything in our actual field with them.
I mentioned that my aim was always at more Analytical Psychology than something "experimental," something more clinical and therefor more akin to Philosophy than a hard science. But it had me thinking, later, and asking, "why?" What is the use of such a thing.
And that makes me think, that a "less scientific" approach is perhaps something sorely missing from "Western culture" now-a-days. That is, what we "need" is specifically less "objective truth" and more "subjective perspective." That seems strange to me, as someone who has a general empirical world-view. But I'm also very much a phenomenologist and maybe there is something in how to square those two things.
It makes me think back to the end of my time in college, where I was just wrapping up random credits I needed. I fell in to some philosophy classes, mostly because they were easy to me. But one professor told us something to the effect of that "Western philosophy" when encountering what they found in places like Africa, regarded them as distinctly "primitive" because they didn't rely in logic, for the most part, they were "lived philosophy" that is, something more like "wisdom" not on what was empirically, or even logically, "true" but rather, how do you live a life that is worth living?
I don't know if that is actually true, or if that is actually what that professor actually told us, but that's how I recall it. Maybe her actual words were different and that's just how I understood it. So, what does that have to do with psychology? Well, maybe that is what something like analytical psychology should be? More a lived philosophy than a hard science?