Guilt (emotion)

Guilt is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse, regret, as well as shame. Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms. The etymology of the word is obscure, and developed its modern spelling from the O.E. form gylt "crime, sin, fault, fine, debt", which is possibly derived from O.E. gieldan "to pay for, debt". Because it was used in the Lord's Prayer as the translation for the Latin debitum and also in Matthew xviii. 27, and gyltiȝ is used to render debet in Matthew xxiii. 18, it has been inferred to have had the primary sense of ‘debt’, though there is no real evidence for this. Its development into a "sense of guilt" is first recorded in 1690 as a misuse of its original meaning. "Guilt by association" is first recorded in 1941. "Guilty" is similarly from O.E. gyltig, itself from gylt. Guilt and its associated causes, advantages, and disadvantages are common themes in psychology and psychiatry. Both in specialized and in ordinary language, guilt is an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something that one believes one should not have done (or conversely, having not done something one believes one should have done). It gives rise to a feeling which does not go away easily, driven by 'conscience'. Sigmund Freud described this as the result of a struggle between the ego and the superego – parental imprinting. Freud rejected the role of God as punisher in times of illness or rewarder in time of wellness. While removing one source of guilt from patients, he described another. This was the unconscious force within the individual that contributed to illness, Freud in fact coming to consider "the obstacle of an unconscious sense of guilt...as the most powerful of all obstacles to recovery.