Bartholomew and Thompson highlight the issues that they see as 'crucial to the advancement of work on attachment in general, and to its application to counseling psychology in particular.'

• Research into the interaction between felt, internalised attachment style and current relationship status (in a secure relationship). How these impact on each other both in terms of behaviour and in terms of changing internal working models. The authors have come across work that appears to confuse these two different aspect of attachment.
  
• The authors question the meaningfullness of applying attachment theory principles to short-term relationships such as working, supervision or short-term counselling relationships.
  
• The authors point to the confusion and difficulties over the conceptualisation of attachment (3 or 4 categories, 2 dimensions) and over measures, particularly with respect to the different results obtained from interview, observational and self-report measures.
  
• Work to bring together the two different streams of attachment research typified by the work of Main et al. (the clinical stream) and that of Hazan and Shaver et al. (the personality / social psychology stream).
  
• Whilst many correlates of attachment have been found, work needs to be done to investigate the interrelations between attachment and its correlates and so produce conceptual models of how attachment relates to other spheres.

The authors can see practical applications of attachment theory in areas such as couples counselling, grief and loss, and coping with childhood abuse but do not see attachment as providing a unifying framework for counselling theory and practice. Rather, attachment is one of a number of viewpoints which can contribute to our understanding but is not necessarily the metaperspective that some authors have hoped for.