To render "Schuld" as "guilt," it seems to me, makes psycho-analysis more moral(istic). If, as Nietzsche so strongly argued in On the Genealogy of Morals, the origin of what we commonly call "guilt" today can be traced back to the relation of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor, in other words, to the notion of debt (including those of calculability, exchangeability, substitutionability, responsibility, legal system, and so on), and if Freud's entire project is to locate beginnings and depths of these mental phenomena in human history, as it were, the most ancient-primitive and residual layer in the psychic formation/evolution/constitution, "guilt" then sounds too narrow and specific. Probably Strachey's SE demands an acrobatic reading, where you have to keep reminding that every common word you encounter on those pages may turn out to be technical terms whose true meaning is very much elusive and disturbing, even though Freud is completely aware of this linguistic-nominalistic ambiguity and Strachey is quite right to leave this issue of translation wide open.
