30 mothers of epileptic children and a control group of 30 mothers of healthy children were tested with the 'Semantic Differential' regarding their attitudes towards the concepts 'Mentally III', 'Epileptic', 'Diabetic' and 'My child' in relationship to the concept 'A person I like' as a clearly positively charged affective variable. The social distance to the disease carriers was, in opposition to equal-ranking tendencies of the various concepts of disease in both groups, smaller for the experimental group than for the control group. Regarding the atitude of the mothers to their own children, mothers of the experimental group demonstrated the following defense mechanisms: rationalization, denial and reaction formation. Specific attitudes in the areas of child rearing and anomalies in family relation were also revealed with help of the PARI scales. The approval of an active and positive child-rearing method was found to be in opposition to hostile tendencies with regard to their children.