What is life energy?

If I should … give a scientific credo which as yet is impossible of proof, I must say: the existence of a specific life force seems highly probable to me! That is, an energy which is neither heat, electricity, magnetism, kinetic energy nor a combination of any or all of them, but an energy which specifically belongs only to those processes that we call "life." That does not mean that this energy is restricted to those natural bodies which we call "living beings"; it is present certainly in the formative process of the crystals. Perhaps, for this reason, it would be better to term it "formative energy" instead of life energy. But this energy is nothing "supra-physical," although it is unlikely any of the known physical energies; it is no mysterious "entelechy", but a genuine, natural energy; only, as electrical energy is linked up with electric phenomena, chemical energy with chemical processes, so is this energy linked up with phenomena of life and of the conservation of energy; it is convertible into other forms of energy as, for example, heat is converted into kinetic energy and vice versa.

--Kammerer

What is life energy?

Nevertheless, the sprouting of every plant, the development of every embryo, the spontaneous movement of every muscle and the work done by every biological organism daily demonstrate the existence of gigantic energies governing the working of the living substance. "Energy" is the capacity to do work. There is no known energy that could compete with the work of the total life apparatus of our planet. The energies which achieve this work can derive only from non-living matter itself. They have remained a closed book to science for thousands of years.

The "something," which congests toward a diseased part of the body, which creates heat and keeps its level constantly higher than the temperature of the environment, which shifts within the organism from place to place irrespective of any nerves and membranous boundaries, which twitches and convulses as in the orgasm, is the organismic orgone energy, the life energy.

--Wilhelm Reich