In this article I have described and psychoanalytically investigated a common teaching practice of shocking the beginning student. The shocking is an unconscious act, defensively rationalized as teaching. It discharges anxiety and frees the teacher to teach, but it rouses anxiety in the student and inhibits his independent learning. The action reaffirms the different identities of teacher and student, and the boundary line that is to be maintained between them. Unconsciously the teacher is the threatened parent and the new student is the threatening Oedipal child. The shock is a primal scene exposure intended to reaffirm who is the parent and who is the child. It discharges the parent's anxiety, rouses the child's anxiety, and forbids independent learning as an incestuous act. This introductory teaching technique of shocking the new student may be regarded as a special form of initiation rite required for admittance into the academic society.