In this article the author attempts to explore how the patient and analyst experience aspects of their process that feel random or contingent, and to describe the therapeutic effect the experience has on an analytic process in which analyst and patient allow themselves to view the therapeutic process as contingent. Through discussion of the case vignette of a female patient with whom the analyst slips into an intersubjective disjunction, the author concludes that contingency and necessity are significant terms through which patient and analyst together make sense (Orange, 1995) of their emotional experiences. The author emphasizes that a traumatized person or a relational organization easily fall into a dualism between contingency and necessity, and that a traumatized system is perturbed when an analyst and a patient allow themselves to confront the possibility that any phenomena could be both contingent and necessary. The author finally suggests that contingency and necessity have to do with a person finding a meaning of his life.