Over the past forty years there has been an evolution in the ways we think about and intervene with very young children with disabilities. Integrated approaches recommend an increasingly complex array of interventions, while resources to implement these interventions are often in short supply. Psychodynamic approaches to organizational functioning can illuminate the systemic consequences of inadequate institutional resources at this time of rapid change. New interpretive frames facilitate adaptive responses to environmental turbulence. In this paper, two of these concepts - Bollas's the unthought known, and Winnicott's transitional space - will be used to analyse organizational dynamics and functioning in a small, special education preschool and the way it developed the understanding, structures, and processes necessary to handle a challenging parent-child dyad.